Clayre Benzadón

IMG 2904

BIO

Clayre Benzadón was born in Miami, Florida and is currently a senior at Brandeis University majoring in Psychology and Creative Writing. She is currently one of the editor-in-chiefs for Laurel Moon, the school's oldest literary magazine, and has been published by the Merrimack Review, Triadae Magazine, A Literation, Baer Books Press's poetry anthology titled Silver Linings-Poets Against Violence and Transcending Shadows Review.


Horchata Moonshine
                 originally published in Laurel Moon 

spills into the village of
La Aldehuela, a silver
river of whitewashed
buildings
below the milk-
drunk Ávila galaxy:
La Via Láctea. 

My dad points to the stars,
outlines them with chalky
atmosphere:
Captura todo
lo que reluce. 

Capture everything that glistens:
the celestial incandescence.
Earthshine of the crescent moon.
The lunar ray’s refraction, melted
against my glass of horchata. 

Two days ago, in the clear glint
of the Caballeruelos River, my body
became a watercolor, exposed under
the stream’s embers. Papá roared: 

Pecadora lengua de la mala mujer
The sinful tongue of the bad women:
don’t undress yourself in public like
that, you’renot allowed to glow (grow) (go)! 

Yesterday, I held the cup up towards
the indigo flames of the Queimada
nebula and chanted along with the
alcoholic blaze burning witchcraft: 

espíritus de las nevadas llanuras.
Even spirits of the snowy plains
from this town observe the cloudy
residue of my childhood gradually
become trapped      biolumiscence.

Fuerzas de aire, tierra, mar y fuego:
forces of air, earth, sea and fire.
I am a spark of constellation bottled 

up in a glass flask of fireflies.

Levantaré las llamas
de este infierno
como fuego: 

I’ll raise the hell-ridden
flames of this fire
and combust.

 



The Raw Yes

Tell me what
the correct yes
means.
 
Is it the silk of skin
slipping through my
tongue,
wrung with
fuck as you suck me,
  wholly fed,
 
is it me singing
for my bedded thirst,
the taste of a shared,
 
swallowed utterance,
       lengua-
     je gemido,
 
my dare to live
 
as a woman of many hearts,
with a big-noised, roasted
core of an artichoke dripping
butter, kneeling and pushing
 
on top, while I sip on
the stems of your flower,
a sore rose?
 
I never not want.
 
Soy la maga de tus sueños,
deseo comer, more, come
here, delightful refreshment,
 
pura, dura,
let me eat you
         raw, entirely.

©The Acentos Review 2017