Roberto Tejada
Two Poems
1
Venus a Polygon
Occasion for us criminals all day the statute of limitation
Venus a polygon in the cloud-form battalion
Every pixilated scale of your skin in aerospace it radiates they swallow
As for the legislators who make barbarous and refute
They listless in measure to a person they requiem
Six times a map whether warfare was whether hygiene
They adumbrate and so betray as when the defendant
With blindfold off the squadron history and into the dirty hole
2
Liquid M
From a radio haze of association there emerges
An assembly—teeming number of persons to a person
Always seeking to enhance with cruel insight
An attitude or viewpoint that submits I am
Nothing—a cloudburst of arms and digitation.
The assembly pointed its rotary ligaments as though
With flashing arrows to say look at the repellent
Little stain incriminating the deviant boy with my
Features and in possession of all my belongings.
I'd arrived from his displacements or he from mine
In a lament not of sorrow but of bitter obligation
To whatever it was the stain betrayed. But you
Promised I was able to discern from an audience
Each face suddenly half-obscured by this lectern
Serving as my foreign shell. Each so noted a form
Of agreement as to make demands and be anxious
For the former boy to proceed with my thesis. I did
I might have said of the tiny humanoid specimen
In place of the many pages I was meant to recite.
The biotic gel was a living system dilated thus
Into a nascent organ shape still attached to its source
Although aching for another measurement of life.
The assembly still waiting. What else but to remove
The thin protective overlays each one held together
As if by some internal gravity commanding all
The approbation of the resin heads in attendance.
Chattering swelled at the expense of the magnetic
Syllables in my lecture for which the boy returned
To provide radiant confirmation of an antithesis
One that made intelligible a world as it appeared
When temperatures from the rain day evaporations
Oozed as from the starting point. This was a problem.
There appeared a physical but weirdly porous
Boundary between inside and out as this juncture
Between an ability for speed to excite my behavior
And a belated quality of attention that recalled
A wild pageantry of pinpoints in dimming glow
Flimsy laws that narrowly commanded me to move
Forward with the sum total I collapse of liquid M.
Actualities of day made implausible other migrant
Episodes all conspicuous as matter out of place.
Boy and assembly disassociated from conditions
Wherein to themetize society in a synthesis about
The stranger even formerly excluded from our crowd
Was to incite the boy's impersonation of the unfamiliar.
He palpitates for an increase in affability and euphoria.
I anatomize for a burlesque of bloodstream combustion.
He gives good entrance in increments and transit losses.
In him there is deficient what I solarize from very near
In whose total composition every moment obtains.
At last he assembles with a series of modular parts
So many ingots and quarters for our present chances
That I ulcerate I discharge I dissent and make soluble.
Roberto Tejada is author of the poetry collections Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010), and Mirrors for Gold (Krupskaya, 2006). Other publications include National Camera: Photography and Mexico's Image Environment (Minnesota, 2009), A Ver: Celia Alvarez Muñoz (Minnesota, 2009), essays in books on photographers Graciela Iturbide and Miguel Rio Branco, and critical writings on contemporary U.S. and Latino American artists in Afterimage, Aperture, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, SF Camerawork, and Third Text. In Mexico this year, a volume of his selected poems will appear as Todo en el ahora (Libros Magenta, 2015) with translations into Spanish by Mexican poets Alfonso D'Aquino and Gabriel Bernal Granados, and Cuban poet Omar Pérez.