Molding of Impeccable Order
After Gloria Anzaldúa
In the cryptic reflection of my morning ritual, I feel a presence staring
back, floating behind me. When I turn, nothing. I continue
trimming the stems off my rough-mound cheeks, and
plucking the stalk bridging between my eyebrows, remembering
not to get carried away, keeping a “natural, rugged” look.
I admire my broad shoulders and chest, even though I rarely stay upright, or
imitate the behavior associated with this macho physique.
She appears—again—at the breakfast table, at the café, at the gas station,
on-campus, on the campus library, below the city’s skyscrapers, at the local bar.
Always unnoticed by others. Her persistent silence a suffocating
humidity walking close to North Lake Shore Drive. Our relationship
a secret to the physical world. Because, she a translucent figure, who is not a divination
of faith, not a being existing of fact, but a noumenon, existing in my sleeping
consciousness, not from nothingness, but from a lack of definition.
Her form becomes visible in my mind’s palette—I paint her my brown, chisel
her face a smooth flower petal, blush her cheeks a winterberry red,
and her ears unnoticeable behind the tangles of curly, brown hair. Her
broad shoulders and chest remain, standing vertical with pride. In my
drunken artistry, I reach to feel her, but my hands fall through the
haze—we suspend in the atmosphere. I cling to the air’s silence, make
my way to the bank, stare back at my reflection, reach in the water, and
beg for her, beg for her. The water slick on my skin—doesn’t drip in droplets, but
enters, and I feel her consuming me through the moisture, seeping
into the sinews of my warranty to be.
I can choose to be this far-from-faith / far-from-fact woman. I rush
toward the merging horizon—home, where I dress in old-roommate’s
fishnet shirt with matching leggings that show through
make-shift ripped jeans.
I create a question to mythology: Tiresias who? I don’t know her.
I exist in constant transition, conforming to my body’s need to survive,
ignoring the inability to define her sensation over me, knowing only that
her motives share a likeness to the world’s repository of water:
tasteless vapor, floating over me, condensing and then evaporating in a
cyclical motion between endless blues of sky and sea
between he and she.
By Miguel Angel Soto
Biography:
Miguel Angel Soto is a queer brown boy, who explores political identities, intellectual and emotional intelligence through his writings. He’s an editor for Jet Fuel Review, a literary journal based out of Lewis University in Romeoville, IL. He also loosely blogs under the guise xicanxlibre1596.wordpress.com.