Sister/Tongue

Sister, I bit my tongue

really hard,

eating a fruit.

On the first day of the New Year

I got a taste

of what my heart thirsts for,

iron now laced with apple.

My incisors reached

for the core,

the apple’s heart—

Corazón de la manzana—

made of flesh, a fresh puncture,

jagged flap of the mucosa.

Poor tongue, my sailor stabbed

in a dark corner of the mouth

still abuzz with rust.

I wish I could do the same with the silence between us—

Bite it and spit it all out

into a sink’s open throat.

S’s stuck to the palate

thick and slow, speech

that would make you laugh, if we talked.

What can I say, sister?

My tongue slipped

and I failed to catch it.

The Red Van

I began driving the red van
the night Angel said his bike got stolen
though he’d actually traded it for dope.
Frankie was a no show and so was Frenchie,
Frenchie-r than usual, rolling the R’s in sorry
over the pay phone in the subway deep within Brooklyn.
I drove the red van without a license, pulling
double-duty in double shifts as a cashier without a green card.
Angel unwrapped a piece of gleaming tin foil
like a chrome enchilada, snorted the heroin therein.
In the year of the Rooster I delivered chicken wings
to a lady named Flo, picked up hot sauce in Chinatown
for Stanley the boss, and guess who’s on the phone again—
Flo croaking why is her nosh taking so long?
I steered the Red Econoline and sang through
the worst blizzard of the early nineteen nineties.
I walked on the balls of my feet after Duncan
decided to Ajax the floor, kick out two customers,
lock up before the dinner rush. He was high on
something liquid and dangerous, his eyes
the color of searing fryer oil.
In the Year of the Eterno Invierno I smoked
a nice strain that made the cash register float away
till it bobbled against the plate glass window.
And get this—nobody noticed.

Guillermo Filice Castro’s most recent chapbooks are Mixtape for a War (Seven Kitchens Press) and Agua, Fuego (Finishing Line Press). His work has appeared in Fugue, Columbia Poetry Review, Court Green, La Presa, The News Verse News, among others. He’s the recipient of an E-S-B fellowship from the Poetry Project in New York City. An immigrant from Argentina, Castro resides in New Jersey with his partner and two cats.

Instagram @guillermo_f_castro

Photo by Theo Crazzolara on Foter.com / CC BY