the body aches and words say
exactly what I don’t want
: not everything in language is ours or belongs to us

for example
: I want to say “red” without my knees trembling I can’t
language is brief, and I am contradictory

I try to dodge the inconsistency
at the cost of defeat, which is all writing is
I drive knives into my chest, and for a moment, the rain of blood stops
(asking who are you? is asking where does it hurt?)

take care of your bodies, my mother used to say,
but every now and then, she’d hand me a blade to be born in every drop
: to look closely at the color that should never be seen

I mistook one hand for the other
: no one told me the world doesn’t spin
in the opposite direction of death or that clouds are lizards
loaded with gems, sea stones, stalactites

I climbed trees and my mother said please, don’t let go
but I still tripped over my arm and suddenly became something so frail

: I understood how delicate colors can be
If there’s no sound left, so why, then, scream my name?

and I don’t know where orphans look for their mothers
or if they see the same trees through the same windows
or if they want to save the world with superpowers
but I wonder if some things can only be named from a distance

time is this now
: the rhythm dictated by artificial jesters and fools
I try to show my face without revealing someone else’s
—the nerves will take care of rooting my skeleton into flowerpots—
wounds never heal, or they heal slowly
how painful not knowing where to place my hands
: what inside my body am I that isn’t the body itself?

and if I can point out any gap between words and things
it’s because now I think about the harm language can cause
—I don’t think much— I see, the harm I can cause with my language
and I see my blood
so thick, so red,
but isn’t someone else’s pain always like that?
to know who I am
is to know which part of me hurts

About the Poet

Diego Espíritu Chávez holds a Philosophy degree from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and is a member of UNAM’s research and creation collective Arte+Ciencia. His work appears in Líneas en tierra. A Collection of Mexican Poems (Australian Poetry, 2019) and multiple editions of San Diego Annual Poetry. In 2022, he presented the lecture “Máquinas post_concretas: hacia una cartografía afectiva desde el arte con máquina de escribir” at the online conference Expanded Poetry: The Poetics and Politics of Repetition hosted by the Instituto de Literatura Comparada Margarida Losa at the University of Porto. He teaches the expanded literature course Máquinas Post-Concretas on typewriter art, visual, and concrete poetry. In 2021, he joined the interdisciplinary arts program LIMINAL at CEIIDA, Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León. He is the author of Poemas Panks para community managers (Argentina: Santos Locos, 2016; México: Mantarraya, 2017) and the strange blue incandescence of mites (Paris: .able, 2024; Mexico: Imaginaria, 2023). Currently, he is pursuing a Ph.D. in Spanish Language and Literature at the University at Buffalo, focusing on poetics and visual writing.