Silvia Bonilla

Inventory

Five days in the meat locker
and the white yarn of bones, I lean against.
I need my heart to shoot out,
like an arrow, to leave the body
by the cobwebs or otherwise
send it back in cardboard coffin.
I blow air to give love to something—    
Back home, it’s summer.
My toes are numb and if I am to be
expelled, naked, into this winter and pounded
into a figurine, I want to be the ballerina.
The thing to believe here is: Temporary
I know it takes time
for God to answer prayers.
Among the cow’s ruins, a faint light.
The only form of language I miss.

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Meat Locker Companion

As if he finds his misery
and hunger amusing,
 
he wakes up
with a laugh—a bird
 
half-buried
in the grounds
 
of his chest.

---

Meal Offering

mañana, mañana, I’ll come home mañana
 
Please be kind to my story;
my tales of this desert ordeal.
 
Bring some bread for memorials
and incense
 
of dried dirt.
 
They’ll find rubber soles,
a cross-body bag.
 
They’ll say after sometime
only nails and hair are left.
The first is kept for secrets,
The other is kept for smell.




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Silvia Bonilla lives in New York where she works as a translator. She received an MFA from The New School. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Green Mountains Review, Rhino, Acentos Review, A Women’s Thing, among others. She has received scholarships from The Frost Place, Vermont College of Fine Arts and Tupelo Press.