Mark, and: With a Line by Paul Monette, and: Erased Lynching

Abstract

Mark, and: With a Line by Paul Monette, and: Erased Lynching Ruben Quesada (bio) Mark We left a window openAnd the waking sky filledIts wide, beechen mouth. Beneath me your chest fullOf curls in the unseen groovesOf your clavicle. Full of spring Starlings begin to gatherAmong the leaves and we listenTo music filling their fervent throats. [End Page 62] With a Line by Paul Monette The night we met I smokeda pack of Camels on the porchwith you. That weekend we drankiced tea by the pool and swambeneath a tantrum of cicadas.That summer we had BTK, thenDahmer, then Gacy. Earlier whenyou were at work, I learned anotherway to leave you. I did laundry.Took a Xanax and folded a syringeand tourniquet into a drawer. [End Page 63] Erased Lynching After Ken Gonzales-Day In the Old West, cowboys found religion in branches and limbs above desolate roads. Heaven didn't hear prayers for mercy; these trees have seen the fortune of men spent and stolen by white faces. I On a tree two menBarely clothed, bloodied, frozenFound stealing nothing [End Page 64] Ruben Quesada Ruben Quesada, Ph.D. is editor of Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry (University of New Mexico Press, 2022) and author of Revelations (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018), Next Extinct Mammal (Greenhouse Review Press, 2011), and translator of Selected Translations of Luis Cernuda (Aureole Press, 2008). Dr. Quesada has served as an editor for AGNI, Pleiades, and The Kenyon Review. His writing appears in Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, and Harvard Review. He is an Associate Teaching Fellow at The Attic Institute and teaches for the UCLA Writers' Program. He lives in Chicago. Copyright © 2022 Pleiades and Pleiades Press