Eduardo Martínez-Leyva
Two Poems
Safe Word
New alphabet, simmering.
widening your chest and esophagus.
Letters that curl then pinch
at their corners. A fevered cursive
drilled into each taste bud.
Metallic at first. Harder than breath.
Take each syllable apart as if untangling
hair. Sound it out. Construct a sentence
with it. Don’t swallow it. Don’t be shy. Say it:
Desapercibido. What if I told you I want you
to slap me with it. Or make you wear a leash;
eat from a dog bowl. Try it. Have it work
its way around your throat, tightening your face.
Desa-perci-bido. This is what you came for.
I’ll be the colonizer for once. You docile
piece of outstretched land. Haven’t you been
conquered? Open your lips for me. Then,
stay quiet, allowing the language of our tendons
to resound. Even if it hurts.
Let it overwhelm you with pleasure.
Eduardo Martínez-Leyva reads “Safe Word”
To Junipero, The Sweet Talker
There’s no other way of putting it: the man after you, smoked harder
and heavier shit, dressed me in elegance only to tear it away at night.
Fistful after fistful of silk. I’d starve, but for the antidepressants
melting on the roof of my mouth. A sharp kind of sugar. And all that time,
I’d conjure up your sweet and exhausted face. I thought about your mother,
how she had men tie you to a gurney, haul you away. It was sorta romantic,
you once said, the way your imagination could touch the shapes beneath
their uniforms, taking in every intimate detail of their brutal skin. I must confess,
I never loved any of this: not the feeling of sheets from rented rooms, the road-kill
dinners, soothsayers, or the homes we dismantled for heat. Not the aliases leading us
across bridges, or the stranger’s lips we settled for. You’d be glad to know I now live alone,
on the fourth floor just above a street where there’s a constant traffic of hearses. No one else
understands direction quite like these moving objects. And I no longer think about the dark,
not all the time anyway, except even here my body is still considered lewd, criminal, obscene.
An insult to the living.
Eduardo Martínez-Leyva reads “To Junipero, The Sweet Talker”
Eduardo Martínez-Leyva was born in El Paso, TX to Mexican immigrants. His work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Boston Review, The Adroit Journal, Frontier Poetry, The Hopkins Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. He’s received fellowships from CantoMundo, The Frost Place, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Lambda Literary Foundation, a teaching fellowship from Columbia University, where he earned his MFA, and was the writer-in-residence at St. Albans School for Boys in Washington D.C. His debut poetry collection, Cowboy Park, was selected by Amaud Jamaul Johnson for the 2024 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and is published by the University of Wisconsin Press.