Goats

Of course I had to believe there was purpose to everything, the 5 AM chicken-feed routine, the
cleaning of the shit-caked cages, the careful cow-milking and the caring of pig runts rejected by
their mother and her milk; and there were the goats I thought of more as ponies when I’d release
them to the hills, my favorite scene for the least favorite part of my day. Imagine a childhood full
of goats, and each one vocal in their own goatish way, and imagine first learning what the word
‘castration’ meant, how sharp it sounded, how my father taught me how to hoist them by their
legs, wide and firm, but calm enough not to resemble violence; we were cutting off their ‘jewels’
after all, our hands needed to be silent. The first few times I expected a joke, something about
how baaad it must feel, and when I tried to crack one of my own, he shook his head, said he was
glad they were still too young to feel, that they wouldn’t remember a thing. But I remember how
he’d sometimes stare at me, still able to clamp the tissue with the elastrator, adjusting the rubber
band as the buckling cried the way bucklings cry when I’d see them in pain, when they were out
in the pasture, bending their soft backs beneath the barbed-wire fence, trying to escape. Perhaps
they could sense it coming when they saw my father coming, when I’d kiss the humid ruffle on
their heads, carry them over to the warm wooden table, and grip their ankles before turning them
upside down; my head turned as night faded from the horizon, and the sun rose into its role
again, throbbing like it was ready to fall.

Lucha Libre*

It was the mask I wanted more than fame,
the tight turquoise leather tied with red shoestring
around my nape, the thought of being someone else
without being anchored to a face, so as not to face
the features in the face I had to live with,
the almost-everything-wrong I pointed out and hated.

At twelve, I could base my mood off
the changing figure in the mirror,
the psoriasis of pink and purple pigmentations,
and the unpoppable pimples I denied as pimples,
reinventing the candy-red bumps
as chickenpox instead.

Even if I didn’t know the one-hit wonder of this disease,
once I saw those Mexican men fighting on TV,
I couldn’t care less if no one believed me,
if I, like them, was putting up a front
because a front was all I had to put up,
a metaphorical guise, a persona to carry my confidence

further than their choreographed jumps,
their lunges, plunges, angelic dives,
their tiptoe rope-walking as they back-flipped further
into the ring, sweaty bodies synced
with the crowd’s shock and screams.
And there I was, bouncing off my bed,

mumbling Spanish I could barely speak,
and barely able to drop-kick into my role as rudo,
the dirty-playing villain desperate to pin
the image of me I no longer wanted, finish off
with a headlock so I wouldn’t have to take off my mask,
reveal the self I feared I really was.



*Spanish for Mexican-style wrestling