Tatuaje

A spirit came down

and whispered in our drunk ears

mark your wombs with wild roses

and between beers I dreamed

that we were soldiers missing our mothers

which explains why we are seventeen

and in a tattoo parlor that smells of ships and motorcycles,

of leather and ocean, of marijuana and sad men’s blood.

We each ask for a single rose

with a ribbon around the stem,

for a word, some power.

We want to be fire.

The artist changes channels.

We watch Looney Tunes as his needles start.

When we stop at the liquor store,

our roses, orange and violet, bleeding through the bandages,

I want to tell you that if we ever find ourselves blindfolded in a war,

or in an apple metaphor, accused of ruining it for everybody

with hunger, or knowledge,

I would not insist on how sacred is the tree or the light,

or how sacred is what moves us—

I’d become a storyteller.

And out of our inevitable estrangement

I’d make us up again and again.

Source: Beasts Behave in a Foreign Land (Red Hen Press, 2017)