Alhambra
I had this murmur, this tremor in my mouth. This whisper of running water, now overgrown with wildflowers. I had this thought of the Alhambra, this chalky color caught in folding mirrors. I thought it with my bad origami, desperate to make a square of color spatial. To make nothing resemble something, somewhere. Have you been to the Alhambra? Red echoes cream one hungry archway then another. Reamy, rhymey hunchways of erasure. I had this desperation
for space that still
propels me to set an elegant table in the middle of nowhere. To fold all the wrong mirrors of paper just so. I still harbor this sense of the possible ready to join a sad pattern. All those times I never toured the Alhambra. I never even murmured the word, nor folded its tremor into paper.
After a Fragment
What is the most neutral temperature, eventual or desired? Say I wait in either atmosphere and round to the dying-down, wade in the waiting, erode in its shade. And what if it waits back, wastes to the touch? After too much
waiting, touch wavers like a wrong mirror, clear and silver, no body there. I can wait forever. I can walk into water cold as stone. But what if I am painfully wrong? What if, in the myth, Narcissus just misses his twin sister, sifts the water for her face? What if this is a myth
about longing and regret, which is to say, mourning. Suppose I wait at that shore like a statue. Like a woman, turned to stone, or a stone turned into woman. It is all the same. She waits, takes on the temperature of water. Each side of desire, longing and regret, paints her cold gray face on the surface: waves. But what if I am wrong about that pain? If I can’t sift or steady this mesh. If I can’t weave, or leave the water, for the love of
these waves.
Letter
Letters so brittle, so brindle and bleak-
splattered, desperate
to fetter. I want to write back, I have every desire
to letter
black, and break, to reassemble
blank. To think
from afar
and touch, there, and tether.
To remember
to send somewhere
long long and folded over—
it doesn’t matter if I even write
it sends, binds,
burns .
—
Michelle Gil-Montero is an Argentine-American poet and translator of contemporary Latin American writing. She is the author of Object Permanence (Ornithopter Press, 2020) and the translator of books by Valerie Mejer Caso, Maria Negroni, and others. Her poems have appeared recently in Figure 1, Interim, Spoon River Poetry Review, jubilat, and Seedings. She is the publisher of Eulalia Books.