I am the woman who was born alone/I am the woman who fell alone/I am the woman who waits/I am the woman who seeks/I am the woman who looks inward/I am the woman who looks under the water/I am the sacred swimmer/Because I can swim in greatness.

“The thing that you have to fear most is repression from government sources. And so in their eyes you must maintain your credibility and your legitimacy.”

The return will depend on how things are.

To Die of Love

A tree
A verse
A dove

it is
written Cock-e-noe but people say ka-KEE-nee
as in bikini or Eeniweetok

Someone must have traduced Annette Von Funicello, for she awoke one morning in the full effulgence of a migraine to discover two youthful, doltish, “virile looking,” and, unmistakably, police officers, murmuring at a scarcely respectful distance from her canopied bed.

I could hear the old man wheezing as he rubbed me down.

Well,
                               It doesn’t cost a thing

When the wind blows with all its force

Curiosity’s risks. Have a spark of it in your mind and instantly Manhattan turns into a puzzle, an enormous knot of light, noise, traffic and wind, chance and impossibility, hysteria and economics, of which you are hopelessly the middle point. 

When at last I saw him  

They are
shooting people

That bored land of the snoring men,

Writing must be a machine for breaking down, that is, allowing the now uncontrolled and uncontrollable reconstitutions of thoughts and expressions.

The key warmed in your hand
and you knew the password

& black like the last time

& if it wasn’t you

All you want to do is murder us, those who have survived

These poems are addressed to Fernando Gordillo Cervantes.

Because writing is also being with you

My exile was made of cries.

During the mornings

Today I’d like to write about what I need—

El Salvador will be a beautiful

For me there is death each instant

The Generals buy, interpret and dispense

And
I never told you
I want you.

The new skirt, the vague gesture

Revolutionary culture to me resembles a flock of birds flying under the open sky;

It reached
higher than spire and gyre
it inhaled sky
with the third eye

When I saw the tremulous hand above the trees

“May you live in interesting times”—Chinese curse

The white moon acted as cynosure. Angstrom lay awake in his bed, situated directly beneath its transparency.

During the short time I had

At a distance the wind roars. Your head in my lap.