Mestizo
By Asa Martinez

There’s a person with unnamed skin
somewhere in the salt flats
of where rivers used to be.
The baby is screaming in the desert
a waterfall not english or spanish
their mouth open like a wound.

Pastoral
By Asa Martinez

If you love me, call me a faggot and mean it.
Say boy. Say brown.
Say faggot spic like it’s my name.

When my mother says that I am as white as she is, it is because she loves whiteness more than
me.

I am not as white as my mother.

I’m swallowing fistfuls of flowers, a garden, a nation for you,
say you love me.

When my angels head south for the winter
I’ll kiss them goodbye on both cheeks.

Continental Drift Theory
By Asa Martinez

When God got back from her cigarette break, I asked her if she’d seen what she’d missed.
“Oh honey
why do you think I smoke?”

Broke Back
By Asa Martinez

Watching brokeback mountain and the cowboys are fighting
When the white man has needs he goes to Mexico.
(how can there be taboo words if you don’t speak the same language)
Frame: Brown boy ass, groped by Hollywood’s hottest actor
A dreamscape desert, faceless brown boy led away into the dark,
Used, left smoking a cigarette.
What if the camera stayed on him
and watched what he spent those 80 pesos on?

(the movie would’ve flopped
it would have been known as one of heath ledger’s experimental acting flicks,
only known to small brown boys who worship white bodies in the dark).

The white viewer forgets about him;     the cowboys are still fighting          but
the southern sky fills the screen
and when I leave the theater my hair smells like smoke.

Asa Martinez is a gay, trans, Mexican writer living on the East Coast who attended the New York Summer Writer’s Program and studied with Campbell McGrath and Vijay Seshadri.