GABRIEL OJEDA-SAGUE

Lanes

if I tended to lanes and met dead attendants
with antennae and biting my green thumb
and at night made a baseball cap into a poison screen
saw a clown laid prone against the neighbor’s
yard and didn’t wet my eyesight with arcade catastrophes
(this is all, I should say, already with your blessing)
and stumbled when the revenant cousin stuck
his tongue out at me, dropped my bag
spilled out chapstick and embarrassed all of us
would I then be larger or smaller in the heart and head?
would I be family gluten? or say then, that I
frosted the joints of guilty parties and lent
shrooms to spastic kids in need
of a break, hoping they wouldn’t follow their visions
down a side street, and let my brain be eaten
would I be as gorgeous as a garden gnome?  

As Charo, I Am Presented

I am guitar’d over rocks
get hummed by dogs
slipping candy out
of my pockets, coins on asphalt
            I speak
to laugh
            or am taught to on Ed Sullivan
where visions of cars caught a Kleenex

got a plaster canal
for a back, as my husband is luscious
in divorce
                        the devil’s
                        bottle is my
                        dance routine
ask ex-husband if he is a monster
and it depends on my
answer to an unrelated
question, the discontent
of flamenco

“picture dwarfed inspiration” the
absolved portrait of Bruno
agonizes over

“this is the story of my Japanese”
as is said in Spanish, misunderstood as English
the routines I put together
as I obscured my birth year

headlining the horror show
of my pedophile ex-husband, putting one
diamond onto the other, the
comedian of an
inherited guitar’s cuchi-cuchi
“showed me the way
to the bank”
and it was burgundy
not bloody

Pepper Bag

envy for easter island heads
leads child
to nurture a cold
see himself
lithe like a pepper bag
and send a warm arm
to a wished boyfriend
he tests his
pedigree against the water
record
and the levy
fig leafs over the middle fingers
hopes hair growth is his highway out
or at least
an envelope holding wind

Gabriel Ojeda-Sague is a Miami -> Philly, Latino, gay Leo. His first collection, Oil and Candle (March 2016, Timeless, Infinite Light), is a set of writings on Santería, war, and the precarity of Latino-American lives. He is also the author of 4 chapbooks, most recently Where Everything is in Halves (Be About It, 2015), poems against death through The Legend of Zelda, and 'Yo' Quiere Decir Sunburn (2016), poems of anxious bilingualism. His second full-length book Jazzercise is a Language is forthcoming from The Operating System in 2018. His work can be found at ojedasague.com.