BIO
Carlos Andrés Gómez is a Colombian American poet and a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Winner of the Atlanta Review International Poetry Prize, Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his work has appeared in the North American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Rumpus, BuzzFeed Reader, Rattle, CHORUS: A Literary Mixtape (Simon & Schuster, 2012), and elsewhere. For more: www.CarlosLive.com
When Two Words Fracture the Mirror
I.
Shoulder and soldier were the same
word. My fumbled speech less
that of an immigrant’s son, now
able to make something of
the white noise that claimed
everything.
II.
My father carried the title of
Breadwinner.
Nothing made the clamped jaw of an
afternoon unlatch more quickly and with
as much abandon as when he jogged, much
to my mother’s dismay, around our
barren
yard in Cyprus while I giggled atop his
shoulders as though gravity had lost
its
touch. The war, barely at a standstill,
seemed to hibernate beneath his worn
New Balance running shoes. He made sure
to jog every morning. Ran marathons by
himself: how a man escapes
his finally failing body. How
he transcends the failing image of
what others believe him to be.
The civil war between Turks and Greeks,
made real by minefields that persisted
and the scorched fighter plane whose
tail
rose from the dirt near our house,
was not the war. The real war
was home.
III.
My grandfather was a soldier
pretending to be someone
he was not: native in German, a Nazi
passport, a dealer of arms. Which
version of us is real? Why did I
obsess about war my entire life,
revel in the flinch of nightfall
scored by explosions, but remain
afraid of guns? Petrified
of that moment a man must face
another man, real or imagined.
at the playground, on the bus, everywhere
my daughter is not flirting
with you at four months
she does not yet
know her feet are hers.
Twenty years from now I hope
she knows her whole body is hers.
Changing My Name
Imagine: I could start drinking
cucumber water and change
how I dress. I could eat cottage
cheese on a hemp bagel, buy boat
shoes and evaporate on command.
I could be Andrew Carlos Williams
and wouldn’t scare Lindsey’s
roommate from The Valley when
I slept over. I’d start
over-pronouncing
everything and get called back by
apartment brokers. I would raise a son
with a strong Anglo-Saxon name
who’d look even whiter than me
and never get asked where he is from.
He’d decide to drop the accent
mark but his tongue would still catch
on consonants (inherited from his
abuelito’s
old reading lessons). We’d invent a new
origin story and always stand, mouths
robotic, each hand clutched to chest
in the shape of a colony of flesh.