Rats Alice Trujillo
Rats Alice Trujillo is the author of two books and many zines of poems. They live and work in Seattle.
I don't want to have anyone in my life whose soul can't burn
black with hatred bright remembering
the swollen void where our future was
removed from us
I can't differentiate these motives from each other:
To pass out water under hazardous sun or to
Gather ash to my ego, senselessly held tight forms.
I shut the door on my fingers to protest. Its too late now.
At work they are hammering nails through the back of his head staring, and with suspicious whispers. It makes him want to cry being so alone and his stomach hurts always. His home is a hole in the ground where he collapses like a cigarette ash and swallows wine until he can stand again.
If I am a victim of murder I might never notice.
It happens every day and to others
More or less deserving.
Why should we write this down if it happens
Every day in this life to anybody?
Invasive crawling bugs across the kitchen ceiling
Eating light bulbs to the socket
And candle wax and wicks
While night falls in,
More devouring.
I learned your name under a crescent moon.
Your voice is the breeze on my remains.
I think you were holding the dreams
when we got cut apart and lost.
In time I might forget myself
In course of vivid currents.
My bastard inclination
To wrestle with the ocean.
You poisoned sad with stoning veins,
I dream of you in morning street
With angry hair, with open teeth
And drinking meat in concrete shade.
You were very small at the time I admired you,
and from each glimpse across the water
you seem only to have shrank away.
Whether my path is ineffectual compared against
what justice I might sew if my strengths were applied elsewhere.
I convince myself with fear and escapefulness of
there is no pure good. No option only to heal or live as a clean breath in smoke.
