Events

[POETRY] Old friends and a local standby highlight Just Buffalo’s next installment of its poetry series Studio on Thursday night. Just Buffalo’s former artistic director, who left for a gig at Yale University to direct a nascent literary scholarship for emerging literary voices around the world, Michael Kelleher, is joined by UB grad Rosa Alcalá and Just Buffalo’s current education director Noah Falck. Kelleher will read from his new book out from Buffalo’s BlazeVox Books called Museum Hours. The award-winning translator, poet, and University of Texas El Paso professor Alcalá, meanwhile, is the author of three books of poetry, most recently the forthcoming M(y)Other Tongue, and Falck is the author of Snowmen Losing Weight. Kelleher and Falck have previously seen their work published in The Public, and this week’s honors go to Rosa Alcalá. 

Paramour

English is dirty. Polyamorous. English
wants me. English rides with girls
and with boys. English keeps an open
tab and never sleeps
alone. English is a smooth talker
who makes me say please. It’s a bit of role-playing
and I like a good tease. We have a safe word
I keep forgetting. English likes
pet names. English
has a little secret, a past,
another family. English is going to leave them
for me. I’ve made English a set
of keys. English brings me flowers
stolen from a grave.
English texts me, slips in
as emojis, attaches selfies
NSFW. English has rules
but accepts dates last minute. English makes
booty-calls. English makes me want it.
When I was younger, my parents said
keep that English out of our
house. If you leave with that miserable,
don’t come back. I said god willing
in the language of the Inquisition. I climbed out
my window, but always got
caught. English had a hooptie
that was the joint. Now my mother goes gaga
over our cute babies. Together
English and I wrote my father’s
obituary. How many times
have I said it’s over, and English just laughs
and says, c’mon, señorita, let’s go for
Chinese. We always end up
in a fancy hotel where we give
fake names, and as I lay my head
to hear my lover breathe,
I dream of Sam Patch plunging
into water: a poem
English gave me
that had been given
to another.
—Rosa Alcalá

(From M(y)Other Tongue, forthcoming Futurepoem Books, 2017. First appeared as part of the Poetry Society of America’s Red, White, & Blue: Poets on Politics series, 2012.)