Leonora Simonovis
Two POEMS
A Man Held a Gun to My Stomach Once
his eyes looked beyond me I
didn’t need to be dying to have
an out-of-body experience in that
moment I wished myself gone
gun: a hollow eye shaped like
a circle the Latin for circle is
circus. In El Circo de los Hermanos Gasca
I saw a trainer prod an elephant
with an electric rod shocking her body
into submission another trainer
put his head inside the maw of an
enormous lion the creature’s
eyes as unnerved as my assailant’s
who held his gun tight does it dispel
fear? I wondered his hand trembled
like the lion’s jaw as he smelled fresh
prey he couldn’t touch I want to
forget about the circus and the gun
in my dreams I see not the glassy
look of the animals but a hand and
a whip pulling the barrel of the gun away
from my belly as I slide to the ground
a body can only hold so much before it detonates
in the same way a bullet compresses desire then lets it go
Conversation Between Former Revolutionaries
CARACAS, VENEZUELA, MARCH 2019
Listen. a red beret is not a trend
but a uniform, which is man and gun
and maybe a song with the word freedom
between two front teeth, like mango tendrils
you understand?
Listen Luisa’s boy hungry pulled
a burger wrap from the trash. I saw
the ketchup on it. And I’m telling
you hunger cannot be wiped away
with tongue.
Listen. I saw soldiers thrift bullets
from the morgue where bodies
entwine in one last embrace.
Cold bodies. Unwritten. Have
you ever held a gun? Is it sorrow heavy,
does the trigger leave you breathless?
Listen, the problem is not the uniform,
the burger wrap, the lack of bullets.
It is the song. Go ahead and listen. Tell
me when the voices you hear are all your own.
Leonora Simonovis grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, and currently lives in San Diego. She is a professor of Spanish and Caribbean literature and culture at the University of San Diego and an MFA candidate in poetry at Antioch University, Los Angeles. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review blog, Storyscape, Tifetet Journal, the Acentos Review, the American Journal of Poetry, The Rumpus, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Her chapbook manuscript, Waiting for a Ripe Mango, was a finalist for the Snowbound Tupelo Prize Award.