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2 poems by Miguel Barretto García


Plant Daddy


The crowd of loneliness is pushing their way

through the door of my eye. My skull is full


of ghosts. For something without mass,

they surely are heavy that I walk with my head tilted


and water slowly drips from my ears like the Sahara

winds peppering the city windows with dust


and cloaking the sky saffron. Today is colour

sepia, but my eyes have long been jaundiced


with a numb. The day only became yellower

like smelling piss. The diagnosis was kidney failure


and a widening fault line between my chest.

I split open like the ripest mango in a summer


I forget. The kids are jumping on a muddy river

but they don't care. I care enough not to forget


that I took a polaroid photo and the sky was dirty

blue. The kids have faces I do not recognise


and neither could I recognise their smiles.

Perhaps it was a splinter in my eye from the spine


of the succulent I nursed during lockdown.

I was never taking good care of myself


but I embraced the role of Plant Daddy.

I now have a collection of monsteras, aloe veras


and fortune plants. The orchids by the window

sill appear autonomous. The ghost still lives


inside the house.



Disney Princes


His chest hair could have well been

a diorama of the forest we built

for our school production of Sleeping Beauty.

I curled his longest strand of warped hair

the way a child would encircle with their finger

a bullet-holed wall. What a gorgeous man, I said.

He is asleep. When awake, he is a beast

in bed. His hands shackling my wrists.

He is inside me like a child poking their finger

at the body of Christ. Curious of his resurrection,

Is blood indeed warm? I had thought missionary

was reserved for holy men. But here I am,

a sinner in missionary position. He talks dirty to me

with his heaving. The Big Bad Wolf had a hairy chest

was sexy. I am staring at him the way I stare

long at the wax moon on a Van Gogh night. His face

a distorted ecstasy. His chest hair now ascends

beyond my vantage point like smoke from a chimney.

The whiteness of his skin could well be a snow

storm after he climaxed. I freed a ghost from

its cigarette-stick coffin in aftermath. It is a warzone

after we finished. Our bodies are monuments

of a moment last night. All the heat of him

rising above my head like the Disney version

of Hades crowned with blue fire. The room

is the Underworld. My lover, my undertaker.

I want two Disney princes have their own

BL series. I wonder whether Disney princesses

ever cum in the ever after. I never thought

fucking could be a box full of ACME explosives.


____________________

Miguel Barretto García is a queer poet and spoken word artist of the diaspora. Their poems have been published in Poetry Northwest, RHINO Poetry, harana poetry, Wildness, Magma Poetry, TLDTD, Rattle, among others. Originally from the Philippines, they are currently living between London and Saint Louis, Missouri.

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