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This week in our series 'This Work Will Take Dancing,' highlighting the writing of Latinx writers in the South, we share two stunning poems by Amanda Rodriguez and Steven Leyva exploring the metaphysical terrains, and how spirituality moves alongside of us and the land. Writes Steven Leyva in The Sea We Cannot Call Sea, "Horizon frying / the onion white sails. We travel proud / with only the fricative of our gods."
Read more from 'This Work Will Take Dancing' here.
Absolution
Absolution is a glistening word.
Nestled in its innards are the slick
twins: Absolute and
Solution. They peddle a promise,
a product, a circle,
a cycle.
Holy water is tap water
in its best Sunday dress.
Benediction
with the faint aroma of chlorine.
The paint on the rosary
erodes
until each naked bead stares
like an opaque eye, cataract
that does not see the sin sitting
on the skin.
Absolution shimmers,
a mirage.
Here is a Sea We Cannot Call Sea
I was grown on the Gulf. Its half-moon
surf stretched from Delta to the shin
bone of Texas – Brownsville! – then
beyond, creasing into the Yucatan's slight grin
resolving in stone on stone, ruins
when a tourist says Tulum.
I was raised in an old fortress of cliffs
guarding the last syllables of an ocean's blind ode,
this toothless mouth, this salt washed memory,
pre-Columbian awe, becomes a parabola
of family taken up by land. No matter which
myths you pick it's an immigrants path.
I was San Pedro Sula and Ab Ovo,
New Orleans and home. The Gulf held the shape
of a bent bow. Barrier islands. Wild light and lotion.
Everyone browning like butter. Horizon frying
the onion white sails. We travel proud
with only the fricative of our gods
fathers, mothers, and cradle-lands
unpronounceable across the border. Calin
then Carlos, then Charles, then anemic waves