Centerpiece
BY LESLIE SAINZ
Your condition: suddenly then permanently.
Long-stemmed sympathy flowers making the short-stemmed sympathy flowers look pathetic.
Like the feeding tube, your body swallowed its spiders.
Psalms on your phone bordered by orange advertisements, afterwards, late morning.
My suspicion: G-d is for playing G-d, looking away.
My evidence: Your blood accepting other blood product in a ward with light pink curtains.
Muscles at the front of the thigh, muscles that lift the front of the foot—they lack empathy.
If I lie for you, Mother, I’ll feel it the most.
A Story of Love and Faith / La Milagrosa
BY LESLIE SAINZ
Near-prayer and not. Pink, red flowers, orange and yellow
flowers and white. In this very moment, for different reasons,
this is as specific as I can be in both languages.
Day of the Holy Cross—she dies, femininely,
on Día de la Cruz. Exactly who performs the miracle?
The dead and buried son shimmies to his mother’s
dead and buried breast to suckle. Miracle. Thinking of
Archimedes’ bath water, the Cuban sculptor gives her
density, porelessness, in 20th-century Carrara. Exactly.
It is true statues are cruel when they’re accurate. It is
still true that statues are cruel when they’re not. On the edge
of my cowardice, reason. Who exactly could call me
by name in that cemetery? Gladiolus, ginger, lilies. Young
women are a series of images. We are regimes.
