Mexicans Lost in Mexico
it was summer and time circled itself like a swarm of gnats
like the pink-topped taxis rounding the
glorieta
if only for the sake of inertia,
we were standing in a foreign desert
the days of the week slid by, uncapitalized
my grandfather forever trapped in the picture
where he pretends to play the guitar
a serenade for tourists and lovers with new rules between them
our occupation: to look and not touch
at some point we could no longer tell if it was the clouds we were looking at
or the building reflecting the clouds
all epigraphs came pre-assigned
the beautiful thing about this story was that it happened
we didn’t see the floating gardens
and I don’t remember the art
only the symmetry of a blue wall, a momentary breeze
there were parrots, I think, or peacocks?
there were birds
Copyright © 2019 by Nico Amador. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 7, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“About ten years ago, I was traveling in Mexico with two lovers of mine as our time together was nearing its inevitable conclusion. This poem, which is part of a longer narrative series that I started in my chapbook Flower Wars, explores my sense of dislocation within that experience and within the memory itself; the imprint left behind that is both acute and incomplete. The title of the poem is borrowed from a section of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and the embedded epigraph is a line from Eileen Myles's Chelsea Girls.”
—Nico Amador
Nico Amador
Nico Amador is the author of Flower Wars (Newfound Press, 2017), selected as the winner of the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize.