Paulina Reyes poetry

Amore Mio

I sit in silence as the music plays and I reminisce on my life before I got here. I have reached a moment of peace. I have found a home. For the longest time I prayed to the Universe to notice my gentle yearning and send me something soft and unbroken. Something real I could hold onto, something I could make entirely all my own. In this house I live in, it always burns palo santo incense and my sister’s grown sage. The jasmine perfume stains my clothes, my cat’s fur and my dark hair leaving my essence in the air for it to linger once I am gone. Music fills the air, morning and night are the same to me. The days I spent. I have made these 400 square feet mine. I stay here alone and write till my hand aches and my head hurts. I cook till the smoke fills up the four walls. My cats jump sporadically attempting to fly. I miss my father, his green eyes, his mean temper, and his ability to get up time after time. His loud laugh and his terrible singing. I think of the time he sang me old love boleros, the ones from old Mexican cinema and or the one your grandma played sitting peacefully knitting and knitting you a warm sweater. I think of everything that has fallen apart, everything I have had to leave behind and put back together. I have stretched in my skin, I have burned, raped, cut, and fallen apart. I have left myself half empty, barely full without a drop of light in my eyes. Yet I have persisted because it is only selfish not to. I do not want all the attention on me, I want to be seen and appreciated in glimpses of my life I have been full and alive. Being held by lovers or caressed by my best friends. In my home, it will be safe to come as you are, whatever level of fullness and know you will always be safe here. On the corner of my room sits my poetry and altar. Scattered with prayers and offerings of whiskey, oranges, pomegranates, and perfume. A broken angel sits on top with a pink virgin Mary candle always perfumed with roses and ash. Old photos of loved ones and love letters I never sent him scattered about in the room. Stupid confessions of loyalty and a hopeful future all bleed through the ink with my tears, nothing no one will ever see. A note of an endearing passion that be sealed in a box to suffer silently in desire and want. My hands bleed and ache, bruised and hidden so you do not see how pained I am. In my home, I’ll make you your favorite meal, the one your mom made you in childhood and I’ll complete it with just enough touch of my own love, something in you and me will finally feel complete. Like I have known you forever and you have known me and no matter however time apart you still return to a cup of oolong tea, black coffee and your favorite kind of blueberry muffin and sweet bread. I follow my routine like it’s my last saving grace. You are like hot melting gold that flushes my soul and holds me still. I wake up in the morning and kiss you sweetly, hold you tight as we are wrapped in cotton sheets and heat. We get up when we want to, smoke all the weed we want, and eat till our stomachs feel full. I’ll invite our friends over to spend our nights singing together, the music entrances us to dance to be together in community. For the first time in my life, I know I have everything I need and need not more. That is the home that I built. It’s complete with hens and roosters, orange blossoms, a mango tree, and the gardenias outside the windowsill that blossom in the springtime. And every night You will accompany me, as I read You my old poetry, make Your cup of coffee and You help me do my goddamn taxes.

Sweet Honey Molasses 

Sweet honey molasses drip down her back in the warm sun
Her skin and eyes a breath of fresh air  
Newness that made my world center close to her laughter. Sweet and dry like dates falling from palms. Jumping a popping hubba bubba bubble gum with her tongue 
Giggling freely, jumping below the willow tree. You added jasmine to our hair. Thinking of what women we would be. 
Tired, and shadowed.  
Or A bad girl who starts a revolution. 
But this summer we daydream and count fireflies or hummingbirds. 
She heats the pot of icy water 
Oolong steam with brown sugar and dirty dusty hands sticky sweet of tangerines  
Deep into the summer month along Avenue 48 we walked along the highway for frozen strawberries with cream. The lingering smell of roadkill and sweat simmers in our breathy air. 
Her ankles dust off mosquito bites and sand. 
I rub the lime with salt along your itchy rash. 
Our eyes drift between being sober and blissful never-ending highs 
My hot Cheetos and your red nails matched, and we kept on with red in our heads as the sun toasted us sweet honey molasses. 


Rotting oranges and dates scatter along the dirt, tart, and rotting, 
flies waspy
Orange blossoms full bloom 
Your eyes 
A honey dripping sweet molasses.  
Flashes of red because we were angry for being stuck. 
Or heat exhaustion  
Unable to move or run. 
Flashes of red are all we see as we stare into the sun. 
Blindly. 
Hoping to become a shell. 
An emptiness of never needing and dreaming again. To slowly lose a light in the dark, on a burning everlasting day, we are falling. 
A fallen rotting date up in the palm tree. 

Apapachar

Apapachar, to hug you with my soul,   

To spoil you lovingly.   

Apapachar,   

papachoa, Nahuatl to caress you with soul  

to give you everything I am.   

To know I live fighting to defend a love like campesinos fight for motherland.   

To see your light gives me life.   

And I am forever grateful   

Hold you and love and care for you caress you lovely lovingly   

brace your spirit in an eternal fire that will keep you warm, so you never feel painful cold and drown in your addiction   

No not that...  

I will Accept a real Creator out there if one can apapachar me back too. I can’t stand loneliness I can’t stand a sleep in the cold.   

How do say you want to hug someone with your soul if they don’t know what you mean? The word isn’t enough is it?  

How do you write all you’ve seen or smelled and tasted or heard?   

I wish you knew the music that kept my heart beating.  So, you understood the depth of my love. Of my being and sacrifice to your utmost devotion, to catch all the stars in the sky and put them in a suitcase, to catch the galaxy and give you all the sparkles of the Cosmos so once you get bored of Earth we can travel beyond the earthly plane and love together on the Moon. With a lonely rose and fox. I can be your Prince.    

How do you tell someone they are endearingly apapachar worthy?  

I can finally tell God I know what love taste like  

Tender, warm, hot, cold, dark, bitter, sour, mean, rude, apologetic, shamed, guilt angry, sad, passionate, enamored, obsessed, distrusted, not knowing. Lied too and unaware of what's real.   

Love is much simpler than that no?  

It tastes sweet like the rain in the desert, warm apapachado, cariñoso, thoughtful, honest, real and vulnerable like you open and give your heart to someone to keep it beating for you, to pulse it and squeeze and make sure you breathe oxygen to fill the blood in your veins.   

I breathe an ecstasy of disillusionment every day  

I lose all my creativity, and everything I knew before. I get haunted in my personal hell of memory, and when you know me then you won’t think I’m lovely or beautiful. I won’t be safe, rather unfamiliar and cold, like my deep loneliness I know too well.   

Obsession isn't love it's a dose of daily addiction   

Yet I stand here in front of you hoping you’ll be my salvation   

If I can love me after all this, and give my own soul a hug, let me see if you feel this warmth heal you too, slowly slowly, a little at time, like walking with defiance despite hunger and nowhere to know as home. I will be my salvation, just need apapachado to feel a little life again  

What is love, if no one has ever told you te quieren apapachar para siempre  

Que eres precioso  

Eres un cariño  

Eres divina/o/e y me encantaría darte un apapacho porque Dios te puso en mi camino.   

Everlasting and sweet,   

Spoiled brat and spoiled love  

Apapachar   

I just want to hug you with my soul. 

Revolution

The city rushes fast as restless students make their way jumping turnstiles since they barely have cash. it's their 20th time this month taking the L back and forth, day in day out   

again and again   

$2.50 to be exact back and forth.  

Day and Night. Everyday.  

Restless, eager, anxious like a motor in your chest that never stops. tired and drunk. Awake, alerted and ready. Overburdened and exhausted students come and go fighting for themselves and their dreams.   

It rushes and squeaks and smells of piss and shit  

Men stare up your thighs and smile ugly. Again, and again it squeaks and jumps out abruptly stops sometimes it halts or delays and we students with determination make our way to CCP. Sometimes we walk if nothing is left.   

We count what we have left of blessing and survive our tribulations just to get our education  

To know more and be more, not ignorant or left in the dark.   

The city rushes on and on and waits for absolutely no one. The city gave CCP 5 million in the summer for teachers, where is it?   

One student stared me dead in my eye of the morning   

We learned of teachers striking and fighting, bustling and pushing demanding again and again. In the Boardroom of eternal childish petty bickers   

If they take away the tables and chairs, students will learn on the floor  

When they take away the floor, and all is left is dirt, we can learn to plow the soil and grow a garden.   

If you break down the roof, the students will find umbrellas to learn in the rain.   

The college runs like a corrupted company, exploiting our educators like soulless machines with barely enough to eat and make ends meet  

Then how do we learn?  if we’re starved, addicted, depressed houseless, and trying to find God to believe in. Our teachers are  

Parents and Community  

Students in Philly all need to make ends meet too. What else is there to believe in? When the Board doesn’t believe its own college deserves better. Tell your little lies. Infect the local news with your untruthful manipulation. You all know you must pay what you owe.   

80 million doesn’t just sit there as your teachers, advisors and staff scrape their pockets for a lunch meal, overwhelmed with your unprepared mass enrollment and small underpaid staff shortage.   

Students try to build their futures and promise here yet their stomachs are empty, their heads hurt, they’ve been here all day pleading for respect and to be seen as significant in this college   

So pink, red, blue, green, ccp yellow all on white posters, banners, shirts and cleats, students gather late and speak of this revolution most schools wouldn’t dare to care for their children. These teachers do. For them I will strike. With them and for me all for me and you   

all in the Community. May this revolution strike, may we win and triumph to see a student's eyes shine in childlike wonder for making their dream real.