My Aunt Let Us Use Her Cabin in Chimayo
my feet kiss dirt like a teenage boy on his first first date
dirt roads; varicose veins on an old town. not butterflies
I got moths in my stomach, fluttering for a new flame
a honeymoon pilgrimage to the snake woman mountains
there was a girl who waddled with me
on the rim of the ice rink
who I didn’t ask out, for fear
of treating someone like me as special.
I run in front of a girl I did ask out,
we’re in the foreplay before a breakup
I yell down the driver with
dried-stretched
deer-jerky vowels—
like I used to, like Norteńas do.
she knows the accent
but not in my mouth
so she’s made uncomfortable
a valley made
from the implication
between two legs
in its center a church
a white blanket
By Artemisio Romero y Carver
Biography
Artemisio Romero y Carver is a Chicana poet and activist. She is a YoungArts Merit Award Winner for Spoken Word and Santa Fe’s 2020 Youth Poet Laureate. Poems by Artemisio have appeared in publications that include Inlandia Literary Journal, Rigorous Literary Journal, Pasatiempo Magazine, and Magma Poetry. Her writing has appeared in the following anthologies: Dreams of Montezuma (Stalking Horse Press), Everything Feels Recent When Your Far Away (Axle Contemporary Press), and A Tiny Grain of Sand: The National Youth Poet Laureate Anthology 2021. She is currently pursuing degrees in sociology and studio arts at Washington University in Saint Louis. She also goes by Arte.