Postcard to Solita

I would tell you to come back but that’s my glum tapeworm talking. You have followers now. You keep running out of bandages. // I read your latest dispatch in a flier buried inside a lusty haunted house book / your fury pouring out & out. I’m ashamed at not choosing the way you did. / The novel has several stained pages but what I can decipher is quality clitoral. // I read about the ‘aqueduct’ op in the paper. How strange to hear customers / talk about you like you were the gory spectre stealing from the fridge at night. I say your alias is just protection. Like a sunscreen. Then they dish / on me when I leave the room. But I’m proud to know you: my spirit in an army / of invisible troublemakers. My girl who dances with her hand before her breast like a shield like an embrace a demand resuscitating motion // This card will be late. I guess you’ll have a new address.

technicolor

talking down. both of us can’t be so serious. I want you to like me long enough for a vanishing act. to be your sweet and clueless wagging shadow. I’ve decided. I’m telling you this now since you’ve already seen my naked lesioned back. why do you talk back so much when you never get what you want? // if I don’t tell anyone then it didn’t happen. // a chicken braised slowly in a clay pot has died a good death. but your delicious choking would be most worthy. // I’m your best friend who led the killer straight to your apartment. and marinated it. your friend like an aquamarine bow pinning your bangs. without need for thinking. I followed you into the pool. I jumped after you and fell and fell. your dad fished me out. I did not want to touch him: hairy slick forearms

Postcard to Doveglion

for Mare

Attention commands what is holy. In a time of mirrors & soft speech
I bound myself to the book and all its refractions: child-body, dalaga-body,
cinephile, runaway, android, ghost. Every lifetime equilateral, my guts
providing the best documentation. Changing my clothes on camera
so my friends know I’m hungry. Eating on camera so they know
I’m alive. // What if I identify with the fish-kid, I said, and she
laughed. How can that be. // Will we just keep making each other
cry like this. Whatever world is yours / is the one I want. I demand
natural light, a hybrid dog, & worthwhile lovemaking.
The dog must be trained to dial for an ambulance.
When I land, you must teach me to write a rose as weapon.

- Yael Villafranca

Yael Villafranca is a poet based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She tweets obliquely about her crushes @yaelv.