Yago Cura
Don’t talk about commissary on commissary day,
or the Liege of Hot Water will snatch that privilege
due to dues you have not yet paid with the makeshift bridge
of comfort afforded by municipal strangers scrubbing trays
in Waterworld, or emptying pod bins in the trash barracks,
buffing sparkle paste into the loam of county corridors trill
with linoleum hinges of time-served, suspended sentences or recognizance
released into the streets like a dirty, old tryant of schillings.
When you write your man, don’t write another dime’s name.
Watch out if your bunky tends to hide, she could be cooking Pruno
or assaulting another female in there when you at class, on your dayroom-game.
Read your book with one eye on the rec room, read the space
like a text, like a cipher armed with ominous nuance, like scratch-ticket loot
spent on roses, graduation bears, gas-station sunglasses, lipstick-tazers.
Yago Cura is an Argentine-American librarian, poet, pedagogue, and freelance simultaneous interpreter. He has been a public librarian for Los Angeles Public Library since 2015, and is currently the President of the Los Angeles chapter of REFORMA. He edits the online literary magazine, Hinchas de Poesia.
Copyright: © 2020 Yago Cura. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
