Americón
Playlist by Nico Vela Page“Not even trees falling/ from fruit can pick / my body off this ground.” In Nico Vela Page’s 𝑨𝒎𝒆𝒓𝒊𝒄ó𝒏, conventional distances between bodies, land, gender, and language are thrown into new embrace, gardened into poems with sweet, lush aplomb and tenderness. 𝑨𝒎𝒆𝒓𝒊𝒄ó𝒏 swallows up the slur within its title with the hot ecopoetic breath of queer, translanguaging multi-grammars. With halted breath—“Sm,all trees/Scrib,bled brush/Low cact,us”—and love of kin, from hummingbird pecks to ditch bitch politics, this is a book that lovingly expands the endpoints of the continuum.
—Sawako Nakayasu
from A New Patch of Sand
Porch is a place on the edge — of out side — near the house touching but between door and threshold — to high desert (so we call this semiarid shrubland — piñon — junipers and shabby cacti). Even the ecosystem indecisive and between. Porch
a way to neither here nor there. Porch — doesn’t much care about shelter. Won’t leave you — all alone either — you can be less or more home or away on porch. Not a very busy place. Porch is an inside
out beside the house: the huerto — cold frame for basil, oregano, tomates, chiles — kitchen garden beside the brick porch beside the house and half under the roof going long beyond the walls. I want
the way porch is between.
-x-
In mid of rye question stalks grandmother enters the field of direction: stream back up hill soft clusters too bursting and Tata wades away
Rather I leave my attempt at him on the bank slip into the rush soft and growing
Little tits, cactus nips pink prickling out lay me (crickets rubbing around riverbed) here touch me amorphous almost amphibian ambivalent erogenous
On a sun-soaked stone break the stream: in two, between, hips, thighs, my
Touch, the planes, all my surfaces: my southfaces mi sur cara, mi cara sur, please surca my surfaces: plow soar through sí surca por mi sur face mi sur sex o mi cara azul su sur face of blue susúrrame súrcame score mi sur azul sur cleave sur sail surca: my South mouth, plow me sur cara
Customs Declaration
Waistline leaves
the skin
desired. How
does this
ass look? Turn
around peek over practice
presentation: high
waists and short
shirts; dangling
from ears, twirls
delicate; socks
sneak an ankle
to the cold; a scarf
tossed just so
you might look
and ask
the commas,,,,be,come paddle,,,strokes,,,left,,,right,,in the body,,,,of word,s,wim,ming,a,cross,,,the page, the b,lank,,,p,age,,,an age of,f,ew’’’com,mas,,, commun,I,cate,,,a cross on the body of water,,,the waves,,, slashes in the p,ape,r,r,are,,,p,in,points of sight, pricks,,,a milk,y,way spilt / split a cross the page,,,wh,ere,we,re,ad / we,da,re / with eyes / drop,ping ,,,,, out / our sock/et/s,,,slithe,ring,,,s,mud,ging,,,down word,s,ink sludge a,long,,slice,,m,y,mmm,e,y,e,lid,I ,running,,,the corner, down the side, over the mouth, dribbling the chin, peeling the neck, puzzling the chest, repopulating the stomach, insiding-out the liver, dragging the arms, to the penis, to hollow out a canoe, to the river, take the arms, off each side, us,ing, them, to, p,addle,,,,,a,,,cross,,the,,,words,,,cross,,,the,,legs,,,cross,,,the
,,,body,a,cross,a,stroke,,a,,,cross,,,,,,dress
from English to lengua
to don’t ask where,
what, my accent, less, betraying,
my voice,s g,end,er’s, my pas,sing curling
language to confusion on
sour lips: where my body is
from, that is, you ask
M (madre) Chile
F (father) U.S.A.
Please circle 1 (one).
think in grayscales weighing between:
form and content
man and woman
theory and practice
non and violence
and non. Absence
and presence, that’s over
worked
in denying
these dualisms name them frame my rejection through the very thing I reject I want to learn to think to write to move in a third space before beyond beneath where you are turned on without feeling your self a gender without having to conform a want for porn of non/white/queer people into separate little categories where poems are so open you can’t help but touch yourself and there are no side effects to becoming trans women getting hard sweet easy or you still fuck me so good soft where desire can waver and I don’t have to always choose don’t have to be so sure enthusiastic yes so lone in my please for something more than two
Disbinary the Spanish with e o x I’m not convinced fits — as
skirts — fall well and makeup me eleva. They took time too —
now
it catches
easiest
Disbinary finality. I’m not from here. Crossing over, yes, but
settling anywhere — aquí or allá, there o where — is
not my aim. Changes day by day, sometimes hour by
hour. Such settling has been done
to this body:
unsettle
from Chilesbian
Como querer saber secretos que sin ni susurrar me separaban de mis amigas.
Dancing at the festival I watched the women not up on stage, kissing
in the crowd, I wanted, not them: el amor que compartían. Volví con una nueva convicción:
el amor lesbiano el más hermoso. Lesbian love the loveliest — La amor lesbiana la más hermosa.
Ya no longer my dogma
-x-
Editing bits of me away, not that gesture. Not that face. My youngest sibling wonders if they were cutting, keeping me in place — another’s grace. But my voice mispronoun-
ces: I cut/ voice escapes my grasp/ cut/ flickering/ fingers/ too glamorous/ cut/ me/ flamboyant me/ hide me/ in revision. Still learning
to be body among rocks volcano-made, hot by hot: sinking earth into earth,
when great gray stone sky and pumice floats on lake: mirror is complete.
In thick reflection grow rock soft, broad as shore’s lilting: trans is blanket, an envelope, space carved out where I and my loves move elemental, unhurried by borders. Expanding lenticular to you —
Glacier cut mountain: heavy water through rock, saying hill here river here lake here. So, the cutting floor: shaping the body is the work.