BIO
Anuel Rodriguez is a Mexican-American poet living in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, DREGINALD, decomP, The Acentos Review, and elsewhere.
Her: Genesis: Dune
I tell my mother about how in some parts of the world
people have the ashes of their loved ones transformed
into beads, and she hears me say bees. And we laugh
about it as I imagine her sick body spiraling like a hive
of ghosts letting go of its yellow in the shape of pulsing wings.
Then I imagine a flesh machine being invented that can
generate a new cathedraled body for her based on her
healthy memories: a body made from the same sweetness
of blood and honey feathered bones: a body that can
survive fires and toxic fumes. She’ll be able to finally
shed her disease and gain a new immune system—
one that doesn’t attack itself like a rabid Ouroboros.
She’ll decorate urban forests with flowers and curl her toes
in unblemished white sands and climb every dune she
couldn’t conquer in her past life. She’ll raise apiaries from
salt and gypsum like wind whipped pedestals. And she’ll
heal the landscape invisible like the first arrival of rain.