Pupusas or Lucha
with a line sampled from New York Times’s ridiculous feature “The Corn Cakes of Red Hook.”
They look like tortillas
& yanquis can’t tell the difference
entre mexicano y guanaco,
entrées como accents y pimienta.
Call them tamale pancakes, stuffed
masa frita, the humble lovechild
of a quesadilla y calzone. The Spanish
couldn’t pronounce popotlax either
—what we called pupusas before we forgot
to add the taste of nawat y libertad.
Take a knife to my skin
if you want to see what we’re made of,
but real guanacxs, we ain’t afraid
to get our hands dirty.
I stink loco with lorocco’s reefer, slap
& massage masa until its ass-fat.
My father used to slap my hands
for squeezing maseca like play-doh.
Making pupusas is women’s work.
Call me a maricon. Once, he threw out
an entire batch porque la salsa
no era autentico. Whatever.
Now, you can find pizza-pupusas
y pupusas from SLC. Now, I smack
fried chicken like God’s Son
into la masa & watch it
pop & tremble campero
into a bassline of humo y fuego.
Call them what you like.
As for me, I’ll call them domingos
where dinner set off fire alarms
& the entire house smoked with mantequilla.
I’ll call them midnights mama stayed up
to make enough to pay off
debt collectors, the way we gave our best
to survive & fill our children’s bellies,
leaving them all licking their lips.
A Prayer to St. John
There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear…
1 John 4:18
fear is love if love is
what a father holds
in his chest is love
when his third daughter leaves
para el norte
after two others
have already left and forgotten
their family
what else is a loving
father to do when every bullet
shell lands pointing north
and have become better navigators
than god’s own stars
when his cut hands
look as if they would be happier
if they fled as well
fear is love if love is
what a son holds
in his throat is love
salty hot
hard as a testament
if a mother
spends at least three days a week
in a church studying god
and still doesn’t understand
her son but loves her son
now who is to blame for that
if prayer is love if god is love
fear is love if love is
fearing god and did you not
john,
when soldados delivered the head of the baptist
who shares your name
on a salver
were your eyes not swollen
as his heart
what do you choose
to call the love you
felt for Jesus
when you saw him
hanging by his ankles and wrists
una gallina india
ready for a massacre
an uncle once told me
how soldados hung his father
for hours by his wrists
then his ankles
porque era guerrillero
and he wouldn’t tell them
where his friends were
as they prepared to hang him
a third time
a last time
by his testicles now
the man so loved himself
he cursed and spat and shat
at las caras de mierda
perros pendejos hijos
de la gran puta madre
pinche despotas maldito cabrones fucking violadores
praying they would kill him instead
I want a heart
as fierce
a biter
a thrasher
a motherfucker
a flood
to make me vomit
my own lungs
call it survival call it love
Willy Palomo learned poetry from the worlds of hip-hop and slam poetry. In 2015, he received his BA in English and Creative Writing and an Honors degree from Westminster College in Salt Lake City, where he founded the college’s first poetry slam team and served as Editor-in-Chief to ELLIPSIS…LITERATURE & ART. He has competed in poetry slam nationally as a member of Salt City Slam and Westminster Slam. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Muzzle, Acentos Review, Button Poetry, and elsewhere. He is currently pursuing an MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and an MFA in poetry at Indiana University.