BEAR MARKET
By Francisco Mejia
TRAJECTORY TO LOMBARDI’S, 1905
King Darius’ armies baked your ancestors upon their shields,
mouths reeking of cheese while suppressing
Babylonian revolts
and Nebuchadnezzar III.
Did Celaeno not foretell
the blood guilt
of Aeneas and his men,
guilt driving them to gnaw the edges of the tables
prefiguring you?
Back when Gaeta was a southern dog of
Byzantium
tied to the slack leash of suzerainty
and hunting shade in the afternoons of eastern empires…
your name first yeasted in a Latin manuscript,
10th century vintage
and leaking odors of herbs,
hops & garlic,
double-syllabled and modest,
fragrant with threats of future franchises &
listing instructions for a taxed tenant –
a duodecim for the bishop every Christmas
& another duodecim every Easter Sunday
The fabrication of your archetype’s origin
nourished the neon of later centuries:
flashing diaphanous fables
of tricolor ingredients
and visiting queens:
signals clarifying the death of myths behind
crepuscular eyes.
IF AUSTEN WERE GOD
For Ivanka and Elenka
Let’s sanctify the antipodal sisters
magnetizing the world they call mine,
and the orbitless cataclysms they outlaw.
Canonize them while still alive,
when freshly glazed in beatification.
Endorse these diametric siblings
diagonally opposed. Swoon
to their counterpoint polarities, and
swim the euphony between their arctic
and antarctic. Reward the dearth
of redundancies, nature’s reluctance to coin
the same woman twice. Minted in one womb,
I am that nation amenable to both currencies.
BEAR MARKET
A word is worth the world in weight.
This word whose solitude
plunders the skies
so every star flames out
inside a poem
impossible to swap for bread.
The outsized world does not
shelter a sole word. Instead
it hoards trillions.
Every minute.
Just see that plenitude
burdening the earth: a polysyllabic
hyperinflation
incapable of buying us
a shard of divinity.
ALCHEMY
What kind of freak
am I,
to savor the unwashed
backside of
“I love you,”
like a connoisseur
of the disposable diapers
my incontinent abuela wears?
What type of aberrancy
am I,
to mine
every fecal lode
I suspect
the eons have cultivated in
“You’re the most beautiful
man I’ve ever had?”
What genus of demon
am I,
to yearn
for the decay
of last night’s
caresses,
like the amassment of putrescent
fruit under
the pear tree
no longer flanking
my childhood
home?
What brand of fiend
am I,
to invert every
compliment you give, their
gassy innards
hanging loose &
dripping…
dripping…
dripping…
all over the floor I
never
help you clean?
What size of monster
am I,
to pupate your
turquoise gaze
in my head,
butterflying it
into a disgust
that mutates my ego
like the richest
tumor
oncology has never seen?
No, wait. I mean
metamorphosis in reverse here,
caterpillaring
back
back
back
from that hideous
imago curtaining
your sleep,
down to the larva
intrepid enough
to have burrowed
in your bowels,
and you so
unaware
of the ecstatic
parasite living
inside you.
About the Author:
Francisco Mejia is originally from New York but moved to Europe permanently when he was 25. He eventually settled in Slovakia. He has been living there for 15 years as a translator and English teacher, with his Slovak wife and four children.