Ars Poetica
By Ruth Irupé Sanabria
Story takes her skin. Story takes her bones.
She finds her toes and her fingertips.
When she speaks, like salmon running,
the dead and the living converge.
The river of memory rocks
the hunger of claws and tongues.
Electricity swallows itself back
through its double-prod picana,
bullets dislodge themselves from
their chore of destroying
the same day over and over again,
and from the caverns of fear and revision,
skin resurrects the skin.
Each sentence closes in
like the crawl of split skin
sealing its red, wet avulsion.
The enormity of the pending night scares the seven assassins on trial.
They understand that in hell, they will eat their own throats.
Copyright Credit: Ruth Irupé Sanabria, "Ars Poetica" from Beasts Behave in Foreign Land. Copyright © 2017 by Ruth Irupé Sanabria. Reprinted by permission of Red Hen Press.
Source: Beasts Behave in a Foreign Land (Red Hen Press, 2017)