LA CUCARACHA
by Brittany Adames
can’t walk because it’s missing its two little back legs,
I’m sure of it. It creeps up the bristled arm, sighing the
fearful swell of a tickle in the armpit. It masters the
stumble. Carefuls lightly. Accounts for its prey:
[e.g. the distant formality of sapphic girlhood]. This
is the basis for the refrain. Mami giggles, sings it
again, this time faster, so that we squeeze our armpits
in bloodied anticipation, awaiting the chuck, and
we scream gleefully, we anoint the metaphor. If
only I can nectar the song. I know you know exactly
what I mean. Seventeen years later and I’m kissing
someone at Henrietta Hudson, thinking I still don’t know
whose body this is, how do I even begin to silhouette
the godless wound, and my friends dilate into other
bodies, and I wonder when my next cigarette break will
be, and I do not want to continue kissing because I am
extrapolating more on this haunting. I want la cucaracha
to still love me. I want to be in love again. Make it
topographical. The law of divine oneness must be true,
then. I translate well when my tension is stored, love-
making playful, and hands deeply consoled. Don’t
ask me to tell you about myself. I can survive in spite
of it all, too. The person tells me I am cute and I smile
wistfully, say I need to go, slink through the crowd,
go out to see my friends pissing in a construction
cove, and suddenly I feel how good it is to die.
Brittany Adames is a Dominican-American writer. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and featured in Palette Poetry, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Cosmonauts Avenue, Rust+Moth, TRACK//FOUR, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate in poetry at Brooklyn College.