by Ana G. García
MEMORY FOAM
Freckles are round brown dots
haphazard atop the mattress.
I have not watered the bed
nor shaved its legs.
It starts to smell.
It’s large and delightful in warmth.
If I lie down, I cannot see its nose
or mouth; even as I touch both.
My faith in the existence of the mattress
is blind. There are wrinkles and
stretch marks like dried up Arizona rivers.
There are clean nails and abundances of fat,
mountainous terrain,
divots that were places of pain,
mistakes manifested in craters and scars
lost to memory but never to the mattress.
The mattress holds the shape of a body,
and the bed holds some of that mass’ reality.
And if memory serves,
there is something important rooted
in all those divots and freckles and craters.
But I seldom remember.
DÉRIVE
Am I to be made human again?
I pray to modernity and offer my flesh for steel.
I would take my whole body, as canvass, transform it into an arcade,
Display my self among wanted things and paths from which I strayed.
When I said I wanted to fall in love this is not what I meant.
But sunlight drying red on skyscrapers sucked my breath away.
I wander around New York wavering at every corner,
Afraid of how much I adore her.
My past becomes a reflection upon a reflection on the Hudson,
My life voids beginnings. Time with love is with too much motion.
In our way we both frighten, like sharp architectural spaces:
Subway ledges, hip bones, windowpanes, nipples, bodega edges.
All night the city waits for someone to paint her,
And when with my words I do,
I paint a reflection upon a reflection on the Hudson.
I paint her painting me longing for her to love me.
ODE TO HIPBONES
Sharp, beautiful, stomach spines,
Although I have done nothing today,
Seeing you, protruding, is a feat
All in itself.
What are you really?
An anatomical nuisance? A skeletal
Necessity?
Are you the backs of dragons
I gobbled feverishly with other medievalisms?
How I love the way you made a valley
Of my heart and my mid-body.
I love the rising of knees,
The curvature of hunched backs,
The warped sharp structure of us all.
I am a house, and you are a house,
And our hipbones nestle all our warmth.
They demarcate entry ways of life and
Pleasures and disruptions and the sounds
We unearth from the throat under our throat.
They are alive with heat. Hipbones,
Hipbones, sharp or soft, protruding
Or cloaked. Clouded but
Always hard, starving, always wanting.
Hipbones host the mouths of our dragons,
And that fire-y breath that lives in us all.
Ana Gabriela García, born and raised in Puerto Rico, graduated from Elon University in 2019 with a BA in English, Creative Writing. She is currently pursuing a MS in Publishing at New York University’s School of Professional Studies. Film, art, history, and her Puerto Rican heritage are the topics she is most interested in investigating and writing. Her Instagram is @agcgq and her Linkedin is linkedin.com/in/ana-gabriela-garcia-conway/. The best way to reach her is through: agg7615@nyu.edu.