Two Poems by Jasmine Ledesma

Two Poems: Jasmine Ledesma

Winner: Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry

Selected by Katie Ford

The Sleazebag Speaks

As the fentanyl melted in my mouth, Bonnie sang and stroked my hair with her hand. I didn’t know the song but her voice was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. I’ve heard many beautiful things. Angels in the traphouse. My foot was broken in three places. My ankle shattered like glass beneath the pressure of the train post. A doctor told me they were going to put a metal cage around my foot if the surgery wasn’t successful. I’d be unable to walk for weeks. But when I slipped out from beneath the black cradle of anesthesia, there was a cast on my foot instead. Hard like musgravite. I hardly felt the pain at all. But I could feel everything else. All of the names he called me as we raced down the street. Slut, wasteland, one-winged finch. How hot my face felt as I screamed back.

How delirious the moonlight was through the windows as I died. It was not my first death. Earlier in April I was shot. But I was lucky enough that the bullet only grazed the crown of my skull. With all the grace of a figure skater’s blade.

I have been saved so many times with nothing to show for it. Here with my same void. In these lame hands. Knocking on his door again and again. But I’m getting out. I dream of a large house with a staircase and carpet and shutters that tremble with cool wind.

A porch overlooking a sea of mute grass. My mother would live with me. Away from these demented prophets who anathematize with chapped palms. Away from the sounds. I want to forget touch. I want to forgive the winters. At the end of the night I am only bone marrow. A great migration of blood cells. A sprawling set of blue nerves. I must defend my heart. There is still good to be had on earth.

Vetter

One of the nurses hung up rows of small white lights that made shadows which stretched upwards into an array of strange colossuses. Green links of electric party streamers ran across the walls, held in place by fingernail sized staples. Confetti lay on the floor in pathetic, lame puddles. It was New Year’s Eve. On television, that small rabbit box with the world tinkling on inside, he could see conglomerates of people drunk with change. Purified by noise alone. A garden of young, fleeting hope spread across the hard stomach of New York City. He briefly noted that the Isrealites might have looked similar, surrounding that golden calf made of molten and erected from a godless disparaging. All those lives ago. He relayed this thought in passing to his mother who sat to his side in her favorite chair, the beige cushion split open from years of use. She raised her eyebrows, surprised. What do you know about that? After all, he was her beloved shut in. Shut in because he was beloved, beloved because he could not leave. But he knew things. Like the distinct call of a northern cardinal. That deep, full fledged flit. What gasses Saturn smoldered with. Who won the tennis French Open with a spectacular topspin. What the girls were wearing out there as they crossed avenues and kissed lawyers beneath swiveling bar lights. He knew, also, that he was going to die. Not that evening. Not in the morning. But in the flush of time that stood before him like the lake that dares the fisherman. Somewhere between the fluid drips and commercials. Like a stain beneath bleach he would dissolve into the milky pool of afterlife. Into that sea of untouched space. No matter what awaited him—God in his silks, dead stars

placing bets, a field of stalking poppies, the coldest light—he wasn’t afraid. He would go. And he would never end.