The Blood Poems

Jessica Helen Lopez

• Publisher: UNM Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780826363251
• eBook ISBN: 9780826363268
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

The Blood Poems is one part bloodletting, one part healing, and one part sensuous celebration as Jessica Helen Lopez lays out what it means to be a strong brown woman, a single mother, and the kickass bard that the twenty-first century needs. Lopez openly faces a damaging childhood, sex, divorce, and racial injustice in these poems. She proves that love is as complicated as lovemaking—messy and lusty, raucous and powerful, capable of amazing highs and abysmal lows. She proves that when a woman learns to love herself, she will live a fierce and full life and teach her daughters to do the same.

TWOLeap

ACROSS MUSCLE AND BONE

Across muscle and bone is the lonely highway of the femur, a running

straight shot of calcium and tissue and collagen growing like a revelation.

Growing legs that walked then ran then sprinted quick as lightning from that
small dark house glowing with rage. Growing legs like a sea monkey’s miracle
tempered with a child’s grace.

I wondered about the body. Me, all protein and awkward angle of pubescent
skepticism, angling toward womanhood and not knowing the burden I was

bound to bear. I grew from a notion that books could save me. That
you would stop yelling one fine day. But your red face never did rest,

and the capillaries dancing around the flared gin blossom of your nostrils
still quiver with an excited anger. Still I grew despite your needing me not to.

I became the puppet of what I thought you wanted in a woman. Then I undid
that folly along the years. Father, holy tree of backyard secrets, how I danced

in the wind for you. How my bone-heavy heaven became your pyre for salvation.
And when I left that empty ministry of yours, eighteen years and swollen with

the scent of my inbetweenthelegs freedom, you roared like a tyrant
fallen, toppled statue of bone-white marble. It was the best coup d’etat

I didn’t know I had harbored all those laborious years. I grew and grew
into my heaven and it was hell to leave you behind. Demigod. Dilettante.

Dogeared favorite, sad novel. Bone-weary pommel left empty and palms still
twitch with the hunger to own me. I hope you choke. I hope you choke

on the emptiness I left behind. On all of the ways my bones ached with
growth and sprouted muscles and flesh to run from you.

The long grass split in two and allowed my passage. I have found the passage after all.

FIRE SAYS TO ME

Fire says to me you aren’t burning

Fire says I am not defensive, you are

Fire says, I only respond

Fire says, without saying, gaslight

Fire is a gas light

Fire is not water and therefore fire is combustible

Fire is steam

Is endless attraction, is subtle and sexy abuse

Fire reminds you of your father and your first boyfriend

Fire is twenty-five years later and quakes your legs to quiver like a colt

Fire is set jaw, pretty teeth, brown chest

Fire says to me you aren’t burning, listen to my fuckboy ways

Fire slithers

Fire blooms holy flame

Fire is your new fad, demigod, fountainhead, fear

Fire be fire and spins your head like a top, dizzy fire

Fast fire

Foolish fire

Fire fueling fire

Fire attracts your inner and outer Aries

War sign and arrowhead

Fire makes you want it, makes you bubble and blister

Fire reminds you that pain is beautiful and worth it

Fire lives

Lives inside of you

You are fire and at least you feel fire, unlike those who can’t

Fire writhes

Fire doesn’t call when they say they are going to call, or text

Or come over when they say they are going to come over

Fire fucks other women without condoms

Fire fingers you so good

Fire is finger is fire is finger is a fine ass man writhing atop you

Fire is fist

Fire is final

Fire is fickle fire fickle fire

Fire makes you fuck other men without condoms

Fire is the new pandemic, is kissing without regret

Is kissing with too much regret

Is a fire tongue made of flames and broiled mouth

Fire strings you along like a fuse you never lit

But nevertheless don’t blow out

THOUGHTS OF PEAR AND JANDO

Sun-tarnished skin like a ruddy pear,

wood-wind of the Old World. It is a meaty

flesh, tree of crown, five-petaled white wine

flower. El Rey of the hardy evergreen. And like

a good vino, I drink you down.

Pear-swollen, simple curve of the left thigh,

where it meets the connective muscle and skin

and sinew and tissue of the rounded ass.

Bosc, Ferrelle, Bartlet.

Brown. Plum-colored.

The cool blue of the shadow.

Down, down, I drink you.

The juice of your perfumed pear

sticky against my lips.

OUR TRANSGRESSION

after Algernon Charles Swineburne

We defiled the neighborhood church park

while the plaster saints looked on from the tip-top

of that cathedral with no bell, bathed in halogen light

cast from the steeple, and your body slung shadows across

the pavement, slim blades of grass sliced into six shades of you.

That night I was sent straight to hell. No matter, I was a willing sinner

half-clothed in old remorse and the newness of a lusty

desirous crime, falling from grace faster than I could breathe.

The slide. The swings. The basketball court and sandbox

where the children play beneath the virginal sunshine of day.

A small sign that read we were trespassing after dark,

hallowed historical landmark.

These little witnesses to our transgressions.

But it was midnight, or maybe 3 a.m., and the moon

was our only judge and jury, cloaked in the black robe of a starless night.

Since I am not afraid of the moon, or you, I bowed

down, down at our altar of flesh and bone and our brown, brown skin.

And all your face was honey to my mouth.

And all your body pastures to my eyes.

Your hotter hands than fire.

Together we sang our own kind of hallelujah.

Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

I am not regretful.

OUR...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Foreword
• I Play a Game with My Daughter
• One The Parting
• Two Leap
• Three Changeling
• Four The Hood and Other Origin Stories
• Five After the Words
• Notes