Three Poems // Leo Rose Rodriguez

ONE FOOT IN THE NEW YEAR

BY LEO ROSE RODRIGUEZ

for Rosh HaShanah

I travel the earth
with one foot on each side
of gender, a border
as imaginary and dangerous
as any nation’s boundary,
no secure footing in either.
But most places I enter,
I have to choose anyway.
I don’t have time to explain
to the cab driver why my face
and name are at war. When I state myself,
who hears how carefully I’ve chosen?

I travel the line past the cop car
parked outside the synagogue,
past the greeters checking names
to deter intruders on our most
sacred day. I realize I’ve never asked
before if there are cop cars at Eid.
Would they be any protection?
And there is another unsteady stance:
one foot beneath the pile of bodies,
one foot on their necks.

Nobody gives a shit about your definition,
sometimes. A word means what
it always has to them. A name,
a curl of hair, a shade of white,
a slanting slogan. They pull you
off your feet and drag you
over the border with one glance.

Every day, I step over a fault line
that stretches to the earth’s molten core.
I’m one foot in a new world,
one stuck in what is.

BECAUSE WE DID NOT DIE

BY LEO ROSE RODRIGUEZ

               I fold my arms across my lover’s
hard-won breasts, sink
my weight onto one thigh gripped
tight between
hers, our naked skin luminescing
in the dim twilight of our new apartment.

Reach across time, I’ll tell you
we did not die.

SELF-PORTRAIT AS HAPLOPHRYNE MOLLIS

PUBLISHER’S NOTE: BEST READ ON DESKTOP, OR IN LANDSCAPE ON MOBILE.

BY LEO ROSE RODRIGUEZ

Let me sell my bones to you.
Let me be a ghost to my own life, to become yours.
My teeth have hunted for a niche that holds them perfectly,
                   someone who will let me stay 
                   at her side, no
                   become her side as mine atrophies.

You don’t have to feed me,
you don’t even have to look at me. All you have to do
is let me remain, laying down the burden that is my self,
                                let me deliquesce into you. 
                                A flap of scales,
                                a deformed fin, a translucence

glowing in the deep. Ghostly seadevil,
let me become a ghost to my own life,
					     but don’t let me alone.

Leo Rose Rodriguez is a queer, neurodivergent writer and artist based in Minneapolis, on traditional Dakota land. They are the author of chapbooks “Fatherland, Motherland” and “…and this would be Moshiach”. Their writing has been featured or is forthcoming in Blue Earth Review, Rise Up Review, Sinister Wisdom, and elsewhere.