Three Poems by Armando Jaramillo Garcia

The Portable Man

In her pockets spider webs of lint she fingers from time to time

Her lip-gloss regenerates itself in the dark of its little phallic case

She thinks of a man who is very small within the range of her thoughts

But looms large in fantasy sports but not the kind you think

The kind with the sleekness of seals propelling themselves

Through a sticky but fluid substance designed to efficiently deliver the payoff

She thinks of her words cascading all over his body

Making nests for the elusive Higgs Boson

Proposing plans for vetiver vacations

And those that he emits in a fit wanting her to schedule him in

Wanting to be the stranger a man stuck in an elevator

Moving in a gender-specific way saying in another life they were

Shocked by the use of handwriting or the courtesy of silence

He walks gingerly successfully over her imported shattered glass

She thinks of him as being from nowhere where any allegiance

Made is a temporary madness easy to break

 

On The Edge Of The Bed

It was the smell of smoke on her hands

The whiskey on her breath

Many wanted in on this without paying their dues

She asked me to take the bobby pins out of her hair

I did so as slowly as a man on death row

There are nerve endings connected to the sun she said

As cold as they are hot I’m like an amputee she continued

Feeling horribly what’s no longer there

I poured her another my hands shaking

I’m from a race of children I told her

Who cannibalized their parents with love

She ignored this as we made shadow creatures on the wall

It could’ve been wartime or the hangover of a wasted night

Often she was the only woman in a scene

Made entirely of men just walking to and from somewhere

This is how I saw her fearless and impeccably dressed

The mandrake in narcotic drag

The remainder of our time together we spliced loops

One more incongruous than the other

Impossible to dance to

 

Recollection Of The Fall

He hid from the sun but it found him by reflection

Arranged by chance in a room wrecked by crusades

Thumbing through sharp thoughts with a thimble

Opening the lost words with a curmudgeon’s scowl

Seeing the old nuns play like birds in the shadow

Of the monastery coaxing gardens from their chaste hands

He could use these patterns without any precise plan

Spiral in his thoughts on the lines of his left palm

If only he could add his own codicil to the will of the past

But his attention waned and some crazed warmth

Touched his arm and he did not pull it back

 

Armando Jaramillo Garcia was born in Colombia, South America and raised in New York City. He attended Hunter College and currently works as a photo industry professional at a science and medical agency. He has published recently or is forthcoming in The Boston Review, Prelude, Horse Less Review, ThoseThatThis, TYPO, The Opiate and others.

 

 

 

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