Analicia Sotelo

Trauma with a Second Chance at Humiliation

You remind me of a man I knew at sixteen.

Every afternoon,
I climbed the stairs to see him,

my copy of The Sound and the Fury clutched to my chest,
my hands fluttering with nerves.

When he said, She was his whole world,
about Caddy’s kindness to Benji,

I thought How Beautiful,
the clocks stilling and the field widening--
his oblong figure behind the tree.

I drew eyes in my notebooks that year,
wet lashes, dense pupils.

Also his figure—slender, awkward, geometric.

~

He
liked teasing me
and also a few others. But only I
read his copy of The Dialogues.

As I read, I felt him look.
At night, I traced his scribbled notes with my finger.

~

Eight years later,
I find a man who resembles him.

It’s your encyclopedic mind.
It’s the strangeness of your features.

It’s the way you hold the burnt sugar to my mouth
to taste, then pull it away, eager for

my caramelized reaction.

~

Isn’t it delicious?

There’s always going to be someone
willing to give a spoonful

of their attention. The trick
is to recognize the conversation

will run out, right into
I’m sure we’ll run into each other sometime.

~

That was in the bookstore,
the last time I saw him.

Now you are a page I read
while holding my breath. I’ll turn you

into something else, a footnote
of a person. Like I was

sitting next to you
on our friend’s couch,

your hand on my thigh for several seconds.
You said it--Do you want me to cook for you?

as if you could promise that and more.

~

To admit I love you would be to admit

I love ideas more than men,
myself even less than ideas.

The thin line of your mouth,
I could have held it down, erased the

I didn’t mean to make you think so.

~

What you don’t say is an iris
locked in a container.

What I don’t say is an iris
burning wildly over a pool of water.

I want you to take yours out.

Show it to me, please.

See how an object can change
when a new person wants it.

~

To divulge is dangerous, but it’s also chimerical.

One side of me says, Destroy.
The other, Be Gentle.

Now this pool of water is a platonic eye

that avoids attachment
by rippling away.

These ashen petals: the expectation
that you’ll understand intuitively

what has taken me years to describe.

~

I’m open to ridicule.
I can let this go.

But just so you know,
after school, it was like this:

I sat on the desk,
we talked and talked.

You  could say it was nothing,
the windows fogged with winter,

the trees outside
like the shadows of a bad idea

going brittle.

It does matter.
I don’t have to tell you why.

--
Analicia Sotelo is the author of Virgin, the inaugural winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, selected by Ross Gay (Milkweed Editions, 2018.) She is also the author of the chapbook Nonstop Godhead, selected by Rigoberto González for a 2016 Poetry Society of America National Chapbook Fellowship. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Iowa Review and The Antioch Review. She is the 2016 DISQUIET International Literary Prize winner in poetry and is the recipient of scholarships from the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley and the Image Text Ithaca Symposium. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston.