For Love
Ricardo Maldonado
Already there appears a pattern of disorder on the floor, myths
of impenitence and speculation that every x is reason for the Vodka and a bag of
peanuts,
is wont yet to relinquish when we approached with navy slacks and metaphysics
and invested that 30s talkie with Vodka.
Quoth vices and the stewards, quoth tomorrow’s Alka-Seltzer:
“we walked to the lavatory for self-examination and discreet shampooing.”
Sleet on tarmacs and the concourse cancels out my sense of others with a second
round.
Three thirty-three seems compelling, if a little improbable when we do outreach.
I know each other from each other to start the beautiful humiliation, differently:
sleek jets, dark intensely urgent with their mystery, this sense of others we take
with Vodka
and a violence of which there is enough in us to concern us. I am going to him and
he will
not come back to me would seem pleasurable,
but for the President on television, hungry for food and pertinently bearable.
Ricardo Alberto Maldonado was born and raised in Puerto Rico. His poems and translations have appeared in Boston Review, DIAGRAM, Sidebrow, and Guernica. A recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and Queer/Arts/Mentorship, he is the Managing Director of the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center.
