—LET’S KEEP IT GOLD. WE DON’T EVER HAVE TO GROW OLD

 

 

PROMISES OF GOLD   /    JOSE OLIVAREZ

 

When you put your hand on my thigh, it was like I knew for the first time why god gave us thighs. Why god gave us hands. Maybe god invented yellow for the cabs, so the first time we touched like this it could be accented in gold.

 

How many bad lovers have gotten poems?

 

Poetry is not therapy, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t try.

 

I’m the child of loss and the inheritor of losing.

 

Do you understand what I’m saying? I’ll never close the distance.

 

I want to live in the unknowing where everything is possible.

 

Perspective is a magic trick.

 

Perhaps all of our love was doomed from the start

 

Maybe more is the start of all ruination stories.

 

This is how we learned to be boys: we kept everything we loved close by and out of sight.

 

My dad rarely said love, but he always left the bar.

 

Jeff said the secret to smoking was to hold the smoke in your mouth and never your lungs.

 

It’s like the truth, it’s just an idea, it’s physical, like you can choose not to believe in gravity, but it’s still going to hold you down.

 

I wanted to believe that brutality had a point. I needed to believe suffering was honorable.

 

I want to learn what the birds know—to love a home when it is abundant and to leave when the love stops. 

 

I go up and up, but end up downer than down.

 

What’s it called? When the mirror looks uglier than the tv?

 

I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to accept joy?

 

We were too poor to want what we wanted.

 

dear god, I’ll never understand 

how some people meet 

a drowning person & offer

 INSPIRATIONAL advice 

instead of offering a hand 

or a rope. 

 

If we were better at being honest, maybe it wouldn’t take a bottle of something strong to make us talk straight.

 

Do the stars only talk to women?

 

Who in your life teaches you how to say yes to your well-being and, by extension, your joy?

 

I’ve lived long enough to know sadness leave & returns & leaves again.

 

All my love misfits into a basement where I promise the door is always open.

 

The most Mexican thing about me

Is I drink with men

Who don’t say anything

About how they’re feeling

Until we’re drunk & almost crying 

 

Out here, we wear the fuck out of our common feathers

 

My work: to write poems that make my people feel safe, seen, or otherwise loved.

 

Those microwave days, I clung to hunger, hunger like clay—I molded it.

 

What’s dead returns always uglier.

 

Winter is long and humans aren’t the only creatures that suffer from loneliness.

 

A lover once called me beautiful & kissed me so gently you could plant seeds. We used to sit by the ocean & talk until the water was clear enough to see our true selves.

 

I keep writing poems that begin with the wilting.

That live in the wilting.

Erasing the bloom.

 

The law of physics requires us to love more, celebrate louder.

 

what was it that I desired? for the pain to dissolve like sugar? for someone else to hold my hand? for the burden of loving me to be given to someone else?   

 

Poetry is communal. I might start the poem, but you finish it.