Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
if found, then measured
1.
Now that I can, I am afraid to become a citizen.
I don’t want to become anything because I’m afraid of being seen.
I am arriving, and departing,
and later I will punish myself for looking over
at the person sitting next to me on the plane, checking their screen
and reading their email. For now there is no punishment.
Today I have realized everyone is just as boring as me.
Everyone in TSA had enormous hands.
I still refuse to travel with my green card.
2.
It is my mother’s birthday and I bought her merchandise from a school
I didn’t attend but only visited. She, too, understands the value of cultural capital.
Today I am wounded. I like to say wounded instead of sad. Sadness is reserved
for days when I can actually make money from what I do.
My mother raised me to make sure nothing I ever did I did for free.
3.
When I land, Northern California is burning.
We keep a suitcase near the door just in case.
A man calls me three different names before giving up
and asks if my son has begun coughing yet.
Beneath all that ash, no one seems bothered if you cry in public.
Sitting around a circle of grateful alcoholics, some of whom will leave
the room towards a clear portrait of their ruin,
which can either mean they will or will never return,
a man tells me I have been selfish, and I admit I have.
Sometimes I want every goddamn piece of the pie.
A woman pulls aside her mask to smoke and says
she’s going to look up what temperature
teeth begin to melt, the implication being that if teeth melted,
they won’t be able to identify her parents who are still missing in Paradise.
When I pray, I don’t know who I am talking to yet.
I take the eucharist in my mouth for the first time
since changing religions and it is not as holy as I imagined.
4.
How easy. How effortless. This breath.
I’m here. I’m here. I’m right here. I want to say.
I wish things were simple, like taking just one drink
and not another, like not burning in a fire,
like letting things be good without being holy.
I wouldn’t have to pretend to try
to resume the bounty of this blossom.
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the author of Cenzontle, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. prize (BOA editions 2018), and a winner of the 2019 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award in poetry as well as a finalist for the Northern California Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award for Gay poetry, and the Foreword INDIES Best book of the year award for 2018. Cenzontle also went on to be named a best book of the year by NPR and the New York Public Library. His first chapbook, Dulce, was the winner of the Drinking Gourd Prize published by Northwestern University Press and his memoir, Children of the Land, is forthcoming from HarperCollins in 2020. As one of the founders of the Undocupoets campaign, he is a recipient of the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers” Award. He holds a B.A. from Sacramento State University and was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. His work has appeared or is featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, People Magazine, and PBS Newshour. He lives in Marysville, California, where he teaches poetry to incarcerated youth and also teaches at the Ashland University Low-Res MFA program.