Decolonialish Love Ars Poetica
I want to feel precious before I die. I won’t deny
it, here. I’m strolling a cemetery in Maine.
Between the bars of wind, the stones prove dedication,
Purple Loosestrife. I long to be designated
the exact corner, a man, dying, demands:
place my body next to Sara’s insufficient manuscript.
Her cat-eye manicure. Her lavender, crooked
eyeshadow. Listen, the man I love, he cannot
be distracted from his instrument, his art—
his mother he did not save, forgive.
Is it wrong to want to be someone else’s future?
And like Goldenrod, turn a field, late, towards beauty?
Like an overgrown cemetery in the center of a red state?
Through the headstones: Ragweed. Dandelion.
Roots growing under grass. Contemporaries.
I’m trying to be in love here. But I was born
with this fence around my faith. Call it someone
else’s regret. Centuries. Drought. Dead book.
Ross Gay wrote: beautiful poems come from
the sorrow that love is being hurt. We are both hurt.
He has named his guitar Sandy, after his mother.
Each book I write will adore a desert.
In my future, I’m wearing my favorite T-shirt.
I don’t own it yet—but it’s an alien smoking a long cigarette.
“But is it art?” it asks. I know,
when my heart falls on a man with his
mother’s face, abandoned, it won’t figure
what was never there. It will not be art,
just my impatient eyes. My eyes. Which
are my eyes. My eyes, which are mine.
My Heart Has A Mind Of Its Own by Rudra Kishore Mandal
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Sara Borjas is a self-identified Xicanx pocha and a Fresno poet. End settler colonialism. Her debut collection, Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff (Noemi Press, 2019) received a 2020 American Book Award. Abolish the police. Sara was one of Poets & Writers’ 2019 Debut Poets. Palestine will be free. Her work can be found in Poem-a-Day, The Rumpus, World Literature Today, amongst others. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Ragdale, CantoMundo, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Community of Writers. She believes that all Black lives matter and will resist white supremacy until Black liberation is realized. She teaches at California State University, East Bay and stays rooted in Fresno. C/S.