Sinner
BY ALDO AMPARÁN
Forgive me, Brother: I sinned. I laughed
at the joke with the gay priest & the altar boy, missing
the punch-line: it’s 2018. People still think gay = pedo.
In my old bedroom I lit incense sticks after fucking Abner
so you wouldn’t know. I played straight most of my high school
years. When I think of Abner, I think
of that 90s Nickelodeon show which played in the background.
My fist siphoned his blue
boxers until the cloth darkened. I tasted salt.
At Sunday school, an older boy named Andy rocked
his hips furiously, walking. Behind him, boys shadowed
the sway. Laughed. When he asked me if it was true
that Abner & I were lovers, I knuckled his face, bent
cartilage, his snot smeared
on my fingers. I liked his face
collapsed under my blow. I liked
the other boys’ cheering, behind us, their masculine claps
convinced of the man I was, my red
hands unfolded & ready to praise God.
Genealogy, or the Only Poem I’ll Ever Write about My Father
BY ALDO AMPARÁN
This is one of seven lies. I grew to love
the absence. A month before I was born, my mother says,
a man came home to dig out the dead
maple tree in the backyard. Says when she was seven
the branch that held her in a swing snapped,
like her knee with the fall. I took
my shadow for a sibling for the longest time. I carried
the dead in my tonsils. One dull midnight
in August, absence
boiled my skin to purple
seeds: fevers high enough to stretch
horizons in my face. My grandmother pressed
cold eggshell against my body. I felt her
prayers shift the air, the candle’s burning
in the nightstand, & her rosary crackling
as she broke free the tainted
egg yolk into the glass. Mira,
she said, & I looked: the yellow membrane
spilling across clear gel, & on it, the red dot
of absence which I bore: my mother’s dead tree: loose
soil in the backyard: my father’s face looking back.
