Alfredo Antonio Arevalo

Skin

In my earliest memories, I wondered why

pinprick holes stippled my skin and why

grandpa died. I would ask 

       about Abebito 

in four-year-old broken Spanish, curious

where he went when he stopped warming

up leche for bedtime. 

       I’d itch at rashes

with boyish compulsion, inheriting Mom’s

eczema, her raw-skinned irritation. I scab

ugly 

         in fading memories of a bad tumble:

I was the monkey who fell off the bed and

bumped his head—when Tita called me

tonto still, when I wasn’t afraid 

       to ask why 

do we have to die? In my first memories,

Abebito is never not sick, never not wishing

buenas noches from a deathbed—I detect

Tita’s bed and heart are half-

       empty, but she 

learns to barter emptiness for ease. Her voz 

cradles me: mijo you don’t have to worry

about that por mucho 

       mucho tiempo. In these

youthful memories, Tita teaches her grandkids

to bless each other, te quiero mucho mucho 

mucho!, tricks us into one-upping, 

       outbigging

our love—me, Nikki, and Cousin Jelly piling on

muchos. Tita makes sure we extend the life of

our declarations,  

    but in memories that don’t age,

I forget the full phrase facing mirrors, picking at

piel, half-glad for blurred eyesight, sunned skin

tanning brown 

  then blotching blanco, forming

a topography of pink bumps at knees and elbows,

lo odio tanto learning names of Spanish cremas

y pomadas.

        In my youngest memories, I learn

to shun death as often as possible but scrape

at skin like I want it erased, pluck at pores

as if the tiny holes might grow 

        to swallow all

the patchy skin around it, body apocalypsing

into black hole, body an earthquake of doubt

as it faces

      Abebito’s fresh-cut gravestone

in my oldest memories. I offer fake roses

and wonder where his voice echoes if dirt 

eats his skin beneath me, wonder 

              if he sees

my antsy hands callousing over him—under? 

I wonder if he lost his head with his hair,

or at the first tissue-rip of frail dermis, 

          if

Tita’s skin crawled in these late memories,

reading her full name beside his, unetched 

stone lingering just beside 

              her birthdate. After

telling Abebito we love him mucho mucho

mucho, we’d walk to the car, Tita’s fingers

like twigs frigid with unease.

Cathedral

Even in doubt, I speak to a god in stressed Spanish (Dios 

bendígame), tongue dressed in its ironed Sunday best.

Even deep in denial, I carve constellations

into cada día’s cortinas, stitch in stupid superstition.

Aún en limbo, white linen drapes across my rawhide

perfumed with praise, pleas, apologies—por fa…

Even at odds with God, I make myself a debt & douse

my hedonistic heridas with salt from a punitive sky.

Oddly at peace, my physics twist into a question mark. 

I keep mi duda bathed sacred, my cathedral scared.