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My left thumb looks at me with anger,
reminds me of my frequent perorations
about never cutting with a knife
toward skin, demands some lavender
to soothe the pain of mutilation, some sage
that may assuage mental fatigue
of being saddled with this hand,
this hand of would be chef and poet,
some chamomile might calm his pain...
He threatens to abscond
with all my right brain poems
to snowy mountains of Nepal
or down to Costa Rica to explore
rain forests, sometimes a thumb can be
a pain to live with, I offer bandaids,
ointments, to play some Buena Vista
Social Club or light up a Cohiba.
He whines and bleeds all over sink
and table, floor and dough, on mushrooms
and tomatoes where the blood shows less,
he says that life without a left thumb
will be dire, remote, replete with difficult
maneuvers, that kneading needs
two thumbs as well as typing, dancing
cheek to cheek, I put on some Portuondo
on the stereo, we dance to old guajiras,
far and wide, the maitre d’ offers
a complement of wines, this left thumb
in his rakish cap offers a smile.
© 2004, Silvia A. Brandon Pérez
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So I sought up in heaven
and down the mountain
with kisses, hugs,
screams, laughs, songs,
with a pot full of fresh lentils
and a tuned guitar and seven lizards,
with three clocks marking different hours
in this uneven universe assigned to me,
with passion, willfulness, malice aforethought,
desire, innocence, tongue stuck out
from so much violated kissing,
through windows, between doors,
with lace from teenage girl
slips and one hundred gray hairs,
thirty wrinkles, English
lavender,
I screamed, sobbed,
sang, claimed, damned,
responded, danced a son,
guaracha, a guaguancó,
got involved in an ocho
from a messed up tango,
put San Antonio upside down,
lit candles to the spirits of dawn
in the end, nothing, mierda,
disillusionment, the memory of some night
in which passion took over, you,
the crickets madly whining outside,
cats mewling and the dogs and wolves
and those small evil rabbits
out of some story by Cortázar
and later
silence,
end of the story
no cinemacolor.
© 2004, Silvia A. Brandon Pérez
Silvia A. Brandon Pérez is a poet, essayist and political activist who presently lives in Pennsylvania and writes and is published in both English and Spanish. You can read several of her poems online:
Eclectica Magazine
“Banquet for one” & “Wake without a corpse” in MiPoesias
“There were rooms we could not use” at Writers Hood Poetry
She edits the Spanish edition of Poems Niederngasse, a multilingual literary journal, and the Spanish/Portuguese pages of another multilingual journal, Mindfire Renewed.
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