Mónica Gomery

4 poems

Becoming the future


Some days the water cuts itself apart as though it were butter
so pliable and smooth its commitments to change, its lapping

its changeling tides that murmur its names and new names.
Some days the iteration of itself that graceful, that steady and quiet.

Peeling up off itself, wet curvature detaching from wet curvature
becoming something equal parts parts and whole. Some days

the water is all of its cousins —rain drops, mucus, pink sky —
and kisses them and what’s the color of an empathy like that. Crest

of transformation, wet billow of now. Becoming the wave
becoming the great motion of every dense breath becoming.

Nothing can be spared by you, nothing you don’t already have in you.
Every angle of your sopping self gathered up, tucked in, and turned

in another great turning, roll, rumble through. Sometimes the water
shreds away from itself, unhitching then hurtling back onto itself, because

all crashing happens into us, all slamming brings us back to ourselves
none of us can survive without getting wet. None of us can survive

without water, becoming water, leaving a piece of ourself.
It is how we come home. Absorption is a way of touching

the world. Becoming the lake, becoming the tide, opening the hands
to the keys sunk at the palms, dissolving the eyes, taking thick breaths.

Traveling the wave to become waterlogged, mutable, known
by forests and rivers and sewage systems in other cities, and streams

and tears and slurries of winter. To journey the wave, to swell and to surge
means the fat hands of children slapping against you, the felt

tongue of the duckling dragging its way through you, the
crimson blanket of sunset drawing across your face

it means you are never separate, never other than world,
never other than every thirst for your voice, every kindred

parched or sated but containing your echo, it means belonging
to all of these drenched relations, and leaping and arcing and

dancing at all hours and stuttering with currents and screaming
with storm, and dipping and swooping and lunging and lapping

and being nothing other than every
possible thing.

 

fragments of an anthem

in our generation nobody doesn’t talk
about the melting

nobody doesn’t talk about the throbbing
nobody doesn’t throb about the typing

when we are born we know about
the screaming trees. we see their

symphonies flicker the dark eyes
of our mothers, we throb about

the mothers, we type
about the fires

when we are born we know the milk
is sour with curdled water but we

drink it & we are grateful because
we pray. in our generation prayer sounds

like limbs in sand on coastlines rivers
sidewalks gilded pools of puddled rain

prayer sounds like sweat & sex &
sadness, prayer the gratitude the earth gave

back to us in exchange for the death
of our species. sometimes it sounds

like we are yelling but we
in fact are praying

Oh, how we pray
we snap our hips and limp our wrists

and Oh how we long for prostrations
we cook what is dead and we eat it

nobody doesn’t grieve when they dance
no body is not an elegy body

the ankles the floodlights the whimpering
shoulders, the flesh doing its fleshdance

of chance and decay, the fleshgreiving, bloodsongs
Oh, how we want, how we are one another’s blood

& we learn this & it is painful every time
we learn again that we are one another’s

blood but not flesh. in our generation
nobody doesn’t talk about flesh

how it burns how we burn for it
how before us generations burnt villages

continents, burnt aquifers, grave sites
naming the flesh, in the names of the flesh

when we are born we know that someone came
before us, someone cut their teeth before us here

on this roiling century. we are throbbed
by forests, flickered by mothers

we ache & we dance & we try & we pray
in our generation we hold each other

by the hip, we hold each other
by the dusty moonlight

we hold each other
by the chin

 

father-tumor

and all the while the body lays her
bones along a moonlit track

the stars come out to greet her, whispering their stillness
burn,​ they tell the body, ​burn and burn out

time like spindle, mortal
like the opposite of stone

hungry stone inside of him
thicket of knowns and unknowns

my body remembers a heaping of bodies
inherited from his tucked-in places

folds of skin beneath his arms behind his knees
anywhere creased enough can hold the dead

he always told me he was born
because the unsurvivable can be survived

skin of my skin
altar of my salt and my palm-print

a father is like sunlight— always dripping overhead
father, too bright behind the eyes, requires squinting

like a wall, a father, all these father-walls compose a city
city of loss, city of ample populations

a city grows inside a body packed in tight with other bodies
a city is a stacking together of elegies

heaping unspoken kaddishes
requiem library without a decimal system

remember the graveyard across the world with the wall
of ancestor names whose bodies never made it back

voices bounce off the walls in the city
raucous of father, seeping fatherlight

the news of it bouncing before it is spoken
the news is a snarl of unspeakable things

burn,​ the stars come out to say
burn and burn hard

it is confusing to inherit life from those
who survived and still come to us mortal

 

Elegy becomes Memory

I thought I was done
writing about the dead

but they surface in me still.
Tonight a memory of him

atop a mountain crowned
in autumn, him extending

his long knobby arm and
at the end of it, a thumb.

His callused, bobbing thumb
balanced at the tip of that

long arm, his eyes glassless,
purposeful, honing on the

thumb. Swinging his arm
from side to side and locking

his retinal optic nerves only
on that thumb, a valley

of browns and velvet reds
sprawling out of focus behind

the anchoring appendage.
His knees bent slightly,

shoulders crisp against the
season’s breath, he almost

could have taken flight off
that bald-faced mountaintop

if not but for the thumb
that held him like a dark

black spool of thread
attached to earth.

I thought I had recorded
every single memory of him

but that’s not the way it works,
our dead coming up for air in us

as if they were the muscled
backs of whales, a memory

cutting upward through the break
in a wave of the waking world,

a long thick drink of oxygen.
On the mountain he was

showing me exercises from
the vision improvement course

he’d been taking, his eyes
bolted onto the farthest bud

of his own distant limb,
the whole world streaming

just beyond his sight in a
slurried fog of movement.

He said he thought his eyes
were getting stronger. And isn’t it

always the dead suggesting to us
the possibility of the impossible,

not what’s beyond our sight but rather
what is there, contained within it.

 

Mónica Gomery is a rabbi and poet, raised by her Venezuelan Jewish family in Boston and Caracas, and now living in Philadelphia. Her work explores queerness, diaspora, ancestry, theology, and cultivating courageous hearts. She is the author of ​Here is the Night and the Night on the Road​ (Cooper Dillon Books, 2018), and the chapbook ​Of Darkness and Tumbling (YesYes Books, 2017). Her piece “A poem with two memories of Venezuela” won the 2020 Minola Review Poetry Contest, and her poetry has been published in various journals, including most recently Frontier, Foglifter, Ninth Letter, and Plenitude Magazine.