STATES & CAPITALS
BY CHRIS SANTIAGO
The capital of January is January.
The capital of a hospital is the morgue.
The capital of the hospital
is a refrigerated truck. The capital of the truck
is oil. Oil tells the President
to stand down. The President looks toward the Capitol
Building. It is a capital
idea. The sentries that guard the idea
do not believe in it. They believe
in the guarding; that only they know
who it must be guarded from. The capital
is in each of them. It is infected
with the anti-idea, the belief
in the President. The viral load
increases. The capital thick
with infection. The virus
builds its capital in each branch
of the lung. When the lungs no longer
work it moves its capital
to the trash-covered ground.
The capital of death
is under siege. Death builds its capital
in America. The nursery
is the capital of Death. Death is a country
lacking hospital beds.
Inside the cab of its refrigerated truck
Death idles the engine.
THE THIRD ANNIVERSARY OF YOUR MOTHER’S DEATH
BY CHRIS SANTIAGO
Take a selfie beside the library of Alexandria.
Take another as the burning library itself:
groan with the labor. Already
you are giving birth
to the idea of the ancient world.
No technology
has surpassed the mirror.
Freud says the goal
of grieving is introjection.
I am triggered by the word encrypt.
I stare at the midpoint between my eyes
until the smoke begins to crown.
One story contained galleons.
Another the scent of lilies.
POEM WITH LINES FROM DOUG MANUEL
BY CHRIS SANTIAGO
My mother didn’t believe Alzheimer’s
was a time bomb exactly
but a slow explosion made of time
that leaves the tissue intact
but annihilates memory. Turns out
she didn’t have to worry, didn’t
have to watch as each moment
got a shine in its eye & came close
for a Judas kiss: only
her knee. Only the knee they took out
& replaced like a cracked tooth
grinding down the femoral end
before brushing on bone cement
& fixing chrome & polyethylene
to the buffed smiling edge. The present
presses the past into coins
you can’t spend anywhere. Some time in
the night, opioids hushing the
stapled-up knee she’d never use
her heart stopped. Not a clot
was all they could tell us.
Did coroners I wondered take X-rays
& why would they when they could
break open even a rib cage as hastily
as a just delivered package? No complaint
but imagine the sound. When I’m gone
Frida Kahlo once said I want you
to burn this Judas of a body. We did
but could bear to give
only half the ash to the columbarium.
New Classmate
BY CHRIS SANTIAGO
As though the ocean had joined our kindergarten midyear
& not a refugee.
Little English
& a transistor hearing aid
strapped to his chest like an answering machine.
They asked me to sit with him
afternoons
at the long library table
to work on greetings, colors,
shapes—when we got to black
I pointed at his hair
& he smiled & pointed at mine.
Static sheared the air: soon
I realized that if he chuckled
or even grinned
we would both be flooded with feedback.
He smiled anyway
confident of every word, teaching me its confederate
in Vietnamese.
At first I bristled. I didn’t need the ocean.
I could ride for hours in any direction & still be surrounded by hills;
further & the moonscape of the Badlands;
keep going & I’m old enough to drive, to idle
the car beside a smattering of bison—
not extinct after all
but not going anywhere either.
Only war
could tuck the sea into a boat
& shipwreck it on shag,
in supermarkets, could force it
to come to grips with plow schedules,
the workings of a gas range.
Who was I
but another brown child
a name that had to be pronounced
twice? What I remember isn’t our words
but a range of possible meanings—red
to red again.
