A DOZEN NOTHING ROSA ALCALÁ.February 2017 A dozen poets. One a month. Nothing More.

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1 ROSA ALCALÁ.February 2017 A dozen poets. One a month. Nothing More. TRACE OF LOVERS 1. Boys in basketball jerseys turn from the sneaker sale and elbow each other. They walk away & come back. The breast drawn into public view by a good latch. All those hormones dizzying the horde pull them closer to find a tiny mouth wedded to their desire and my belly whose ancient scrolls unfurl. Is this not what they bargained for?

2 ROSA ALCALÁ.February What other animals are awake with us? The cats hide beneath their paws. The neighbor s five dogs peaceful at this opaque and formless hour. A lizard s white underbelly strobes across the bathroom window. Our bed wild kingdom our burrow. You suckle me into the dream of the tiger running after the baby antelope. My brothers yell, GO! GO! and I turn from the TV set as wobbly-legged he collapses into brush.

3 ROSA ALCALÁ.February The breast pump buzzes & beeps at intervals through my office door. Their professor perverse madonna & machine if suddenly they entered with camera. My body is penmanship marginal to their poems. Why alarm them? My rushed sign reads: Do Not Distu^b R 4. The cacophony of mating season on NPR. Could a male penguin thaw this bag of breast milk between fat and fur? I cannot imagine sex in Antarctica. (I m not to imagine sex at all)

4 ROSA ALCALÁ.February Halo of milk inside the bra cup. The afterimage, the olfactoid. A shroud for the faithful. Who is just one. O, ye of little faith. 6. In the playground no one smells on me the cumulative trace of lovers. My milk, my ilk as alibi. But I want to confess to fantasies filthier than the baby pool. Then a phobia, a strange moral tic. The bra flap clicks back into place.

5 ROSA ALCALÁ.February At the baby shower she unwraps and holds in the air a Hooter Hider.

6 ROSA ALCALÁ.February THIS IS NOT THE END OF MY FILM CAREER Look, I may be no Meryl Streep, but unlike that Daughter of the Revolution, I do my own stunts. Wig or no wig, I m gonna play the hell out this part. For example, in the first scene, they wanted grandma to break a hip, so I gave them a broken hip: I careened from kitchen counter, over stools, and fell precisely on my mark. People know when they are fooled, they want the real thing. Do you know what I told the director when the firemen chopped down the door to save poor old granny? I cannot work like this. They are too pretty to put out fires. I ll just lie here until you find the right type to carry me off screen. The child actors like my very own children! grew tired of the delays and shoved the food stylist s props into their mouths. It s the same thing for this extended nursing home scene. I told the director, look the lighting in here is terrible, and there are so many characters at different hours, I m not sure we even know what the story is anymore. I ll have to review my contract when my son comes in for his cameo. Did I mention my daughter-in-law wrote the script? She keeps revising it, but the ending s the same. Sure, I ve heard the gossip that I m being replaced by someone younger. One day, I ll just walk out the door and into a location with better exposure.

7 ROSA ALCALÁ.February ROSA ALCALÁ Rosa Alcalá is the author of three books of poetry, Undocumentaries and The Lust of Unsentimental Waters, both from Shearsman Books (2010 & 2011), and M(y)Other Tongue (forthcoming 2017, Futurepoem Books). Her poetry has also appeared in a number of anthologies, including Stephen Burt s The Poem is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them (Harvard UP, 2016) and Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing (Counterpath, 2014). The recipient of an NEA Translation Fellowship, she has translated poetry by Lila Zemborain, Lourdes Vázquez, and others, and her translations appear in The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry. Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), which she edited, was runner-up for a PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Born and raised in Paterson, NJ, she now lives in El Paso, TX, where she teaches in the Department of Creative Writing and Bilingual MFA Program at the University of Texas- El Paso.