Goldfish
BY FRANCISCO MÁRQUEZ
After we found it, motionless on the floor, an amber ray
refracting on porcelain, my sister took a knife to its side
and sliced it, two halves revealing a single squalid thing
like the underside of an embroidery. Years ago I was told
the only way to ever know tenderness is to dismantle it,
so I think that’s where our questions began, in the body
of a fish, an animal so invisible it was almost ornamental,
internal organs so translucent they resembled Victorian
gowns, its swimbladder suspended amidst the folds
of its accordion heart, intestine rolled up in the braiding
of a rope, and so much existed inside it (a living machinery!)
that the goldfish became more real in death than in life:
I was ashamed to have thought this, as I was ashamed
in the hospital to see our great-grandmother motionless
in bed, not dead, unable to remember who I was, her stillness
terribly material, somehow weighty but nearly evaporative,
and I wanted to turn away from her, her body emptied
of soul, but I moved even closer, and like one who studies
a corpse to know what it is that moves a hand, I looked
in her eyes to find in them the end of knowledge.
The Bulge
BY FRANCISCO MÁRQUEZ
Let me tell you of that first encounter. Summer. I am thirteen.
My father takes me to see his friend the repairman fixing
the roof of a home. We drive into alleys that narrow between
houses miles from where we lived, and I am bored, accustomed,
as children are, to do as I am told, wear what I’m told to wear.
This was before the age of choice, before I picked at the shape
of my clothes and, imageless, held no faith on which to rest
my suffering, until that Sunday in August when the heavy sun
threw its heat on the tops of houses and handymen undressed
to sweat a little better. When we arrive, the driveway is mostly dirt,
as was the chest of the man with the name I don’t remember,
mixed with paint on a trail of fur that lowered to his hairier belly,
near his hips where he hung an undershirt tucked at the edge
of his jeans, by the belt that sagged with the implements
of his labor, and this new desire, so much like a ghost, turned
recognizable by a shift in the air, as yet unannounced before
my eyes descended to the bulge, which grew in heft like God,
or the mountain on which it’s said He resides, where Moses
received the Holy Commandments knowing well all the pain
they would bring. Maybe faith is the risk to know you are
but an instrument. Let it be with me, I say, according to You.
