jo reyes-boitel

Bio:
​jo reyes-boitel is a poet, essayist, and playwright. Somehow born in Minnesota, her family calls Texas, Florida, Mexico, and/or Cuba home. Formerly a music researcher and a sometimes hand percussionist. Publications include Scalawag Journal, La Voz de Esperanza, Chachalaca Review, Borderlands, The Americas Review, and Your Impossible Voice. Her book, Michael + Josephine, a novel in verse, is available through FlowerSong Books.

Last Night I Was Killed By A Man ​

After Natalie Scenters-Zapico 

That the monarchs come through our city at all is an astonishment. They are fleeing this country, called The New Death, and our city is a bruise of constellations now made borderlands. Cloud upon cloud of dust have left us decimated, wheezing. We are a country that is dying. 

The man notices none of this.  

The yard has not been watered. The rosemary are dying. Sage brushes pulled out weeks ago, exposing worms from the panting soil. I am already dead. The man has hidden me in a history where I have little I can say, save the whispers I reveal to the bartender down the street between glasses of rum & coke. This is death then, even if my mouth is half opened in wait. The man does not question his status. The man says it is late at night and so it is. The man says the house needs sweeping and so he works to rectify that. Grieving isn’t a necessity when there are women to be hunted. Women who will tend to the garden and cook a meal and sweep the  goddamn floor.  Any woman will do.  

I wear bells 
     coyolxauhqui 
 
torn limb from limb,  no one bothered as I put myself back together 
after countless moons, I managed a walk 
 
my face scarred, unrecognizable    my skin a topography of injury 
 
only when I dared walk through, bells singing my return, 
was I ridiculed, questioned:    ingrata     whore    caprichosa               
 
spit in my face, how I was reminded I deserved this pain  
how dare I pin myself together    sew piece by piece 
each thread considered, pieces pulled apart again and re-sewn 
 
until the heat swells my flesh until I can’t hear 
flesh welding into stone     falling into itself 
     a seed to start again 
until only my voice clips 
at the sky