mónica teresa ortiz

I tried my best to keep our conversations ethical     to be honest about the ways in which   
we love we fuck we fight we forgive we repair
perhaps this is an attempt to create an embodied reaction towards audacity
we live under a regime of techne & my love always already tends to feel bifurcated
because I am 45 & have worshipped legions of bodies        let’s avoid the economics of confession

what is at stake here?
is it me?
the point of discussion is the narrator & this is a portrait of an alchemist
my only task is clarification

I am afraid that – when I die – people will publish hasty & inaccurate gossip
they might have been astonished at my rare taste in Café Bustelo for my morning coffee or selected
fabrics repurposed from the Texas Thrift Superstore, so they alter the facts to produce a myth or
projection of my preferences I spent years refining them

I hope the interest around me wanes when I pass
no need for invented ethos try to reorient your sensibilities a moment & consider that the state takes
joy in surveillance there is nothing queer about the panopticon that we live in
we should not search for pleasure in policing anyone in this century   let us relinquish the often
unceremonious conflation between sex & eroticism – they aren’t the same
facts are not unequivocable & I will not waver on false claims
what if I said I read Lacan & my diagnosis is that desire is illegitimate under cisheteropatriarchy &
white supremacy? my friend a Libra poet suggested that if I were drunk, it would be a good pick up
line at a bar

I stopped going to bars like that in 2019 so I could become/be with        myself         that is the
locus of my discipline I only commit when I am ready to eat

swallow bone shards though & loss becomes the priority we preserve – my former lover denies my
presence & defines it not by my absence but by my irrelevance & by extension this is an attempt to
negate queerness – does this leave me suspended?

unlike Barthes’ I am not waiting      Baldwin wouldn’t have chased

people want to know if this is a palimpsest if everything was scrubbed raw to disguise the original
story                 my ancestors do not want me to believe that my existence is subtle or negotiable
  see language allows love to remain a subject & symbol that we can choose to recognize or
ignore

so then what if         rather than starting with jouissance

I start with ruins & tell you we do not get to choose

our assassins

butterfly’s dingy blessing
trail of crushed dandelions
inner ear tick
troll house along the tree line
subatomic pressure of yarrow feral stabs swamp air
spider shimmers in a kinky web
pollen detonated
duende surges from salty plants
the minotaur lives in my body
wet hooves wreck grass
my wasted yearning governs this nervous system
if only I could molt this memory
raw blood like          honey
soft spit in my mouth