Bad things are going to happen.
Your tomatoes will grow a fungus
and your cat will get run over.
Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream
melting in the car and throw
your blue cashmere sweater in the drier.
Your husband will sleep
with a girl your daughter’s age, her breasts spilling
out of her blouse. Or your wife
will remember she’s a lesbian
and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat—
the one you never really liked—will contract a disease
that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth
every four hours. Your parents will die.
No matter how many vitamins you take,
how much Pilates, you’ll lose your keys,
your hair and your memory. If your daughter
doesn’t plug her heart
into every live socket she passes,
you’ll come home to find your son has emptied
the refrigerator, dragged it to the curb,
and called the used appliance store for a pick up—drug money.
There’s a Buddhist story of a woman chased by a tiger.
When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine
and climbs half way down. But there’s also a tiger below.
And two mice—one white, one black—scurry out
and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point
she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice.
She looks up, down, at the mice.
Then she eats the strawberry.
So here’s the view, the breeze, the pulse
in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you’ll get fat,
slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel
and crack your hip. You’ll be lonely.
Oh taste how sweet and tart
the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
crunch between your teeth.

^{This poem takes its title from the headline of an article published by Remezcla 
on Sept. 21st, 2018.}

Haloed by the glow of the multiverse swirling
above La Silla Observatory, your pyrex eye 
spotted an orb three times the mass of Jupiter.

                                   All these lenses leering at the heavens, 
                                   and yet it was you who identified
                                   HD110014C. You were reluctant to call

           it discovery, perhaps because you know 
           all too well what poisons gush forth
           from that word. Or maybe you suspect 

                                                         you are not the first because you 
                                                         know there is no such thing
                                                         as firsts. Still, you did what no 

gringo ever could: you made another world
visible to nosotrxs. Perchance it was HD110014C 
that actually recognized you long before your

                       spectroscopic lens detected her.
                       It might even be that she had already 
                       decided to entrust you with making

                                              her presence known to our kind.
                                              After all, you proved yourself more
                                              than worthy of such responsibility

when you said your
finding was “not
exceptional,” annihilating

                                   the misguided western patriarchal notion
                                   of greatness too many others have used 
                                   to boost themselves since 1492. 

                                                        You even confessed your introduction 
                                                         to HD110014C
                                                         was entirely an accident,

           a courageous admission that eclipses
           the bumbling arrogance of every Columbus,
           every Cortez, every Pizarro. From 300 million 

                               light years away you glimpsed 
                               another possibility, then befriended
                               two more exoplanets before 

your 28th year around
our lilliputian sun. You, 
sprung from a country

                                   crystillized in its mourning 
                                   of the disappeared, 
                                   met a glorious

                                                                     dawn and flash 
                                                                     fused to emerge 
                                                                     as one

                                              woman search party.
                                              Maestra Maritza, I know
                                              this goes against all

scientific wisdom, but I can’t help but theorize
that these three interstellar marvels you’ve pulled 
into our orbit have become a new home for those 

                       that collapsed into the event horizon 
                       of imperial cruelty. I like to suppose 
                       that our gente were never erased 

but rather beamed to a star system
that does not regard them as merely tool 
or trinket, a galaxy where their dreams 

                                                          are as important as those 
                                                          who dwell in some imaginary 
                                                          North. Could it be, Maritza,

that what you scoped out there among 
the shimmering Allness was in fact 
a reunion pachanga thrown on the gold 

                        dust rings of a wandering star where discovery 
                        is not a sword of Damocles but instead a feathered
                        reentry path for those who have been missing us.

I call for you cultivation of strength in the dark.
Dark gardening
in the vertigo cold.
in the hot paralysis.
Under the wolves and coyotes of particular silences.
Where it is dry.
Where it is dry.
I call for you
cultivation of victory Over
long blows that you want to give and blows you are going to get.

Over
what wants to crumble you down, to sicken
you. I call for you
cultivation of strength to heal and enhance
in the non-cheering dark,
in the many many mornings-after;
in the chalk and choke.