Raquel Gutiérrez
Chicanos Practice Makes Prerogative
Chronos is the one.
eats half-white children, whole
green feather, blood fang
survive, alright?
ombligo stitched together,
my leather belt
Chronos is the same
mates with brown women
in a desert that seeks capital,
where suns rotate closer
and codex eviction, daughter
of a television snowstorm
side-saddle and bareback
leathered once again.
father unhinges braces
from her chubby legs
buys time to defy, and swallow
sibling clay come to life
it’s me. I embrace white divine
full body flavor living in an urn
la india mi negra on the back of
a burden, a beast we pick up
and leave again
To Be An Unfathomable Species
is to be in the absence of armor,
where bone,
muscle and stone meet.
And to follow the law of softness,
inhabit liability in the wake of whatever it takes
to make yourself a lightshow, orchids and comettails
phenomena to melt the metal our bodies grew.
How distant this everyday passing for real this life
and all of its casings aside.
where epistolary novels
and cocktail glasses imprinted with red red healing, do you feel it?
Raquel Gutiérrez is an essayist, arts critic/writer, and poet. Born and raised in Los Angeles they currently live in Tucson, Arizona. Raquel is a 2017 recipient of the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Their poetry and essays have appeared online and in print including NPR Music, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Georgia Review, The New Inquiry, FENCE, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. Raquel’s first book of prose, Brown Neon, will be published by Coffee House Press in the Spring of 2022.