Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

 “A While” Means January[1]

BIO

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the daughter of Mexican immigrants and the author of Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications 2016). She is a former Steinbeck Fellow, Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner and Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grantee. She’s received residencies from Hedgebrook, Ragdale, National Parks Arts Foundation and Poetry Foundation and is a member of Macondo Writers’ Workshop. Her work is published in The Acentos Review, CALYX, crazyhorse, and American Poetry Review among others. A dramatization of her poem "Our Lady of the Water Gallons," directed by Jesús Salvador Treviño, can be viewed at latinopia.com. She is a cofounder of Women Who Submit. 

xochitljulisa.wordpress.com

Twitter & IG: @xochitljulisa

“It’s like you fell from the sky,”
he said mystified, but he didn’t know
I conjured him in a new moon.
Bees buzz in his ears ordering
him to work till callouses grow
into houses for their dreams.
I pour thick gold over hands
to soothe the sting. I knead between
knotted shoulder blades
until his body is a river. I whisper,
“I’m gonna keep you in love with me.”
For a while this hushes him
into peace. In winter, I nestled
in his lap, legs hitched around his waist.
Our bodies rocked with ocean waves
and a full moon. “You can give me
all your love,” he said. I wasn’t so sure.
The moon nodded, “Go ahead.
I’ll keep you in love for a while.”


[1] This poem contains the words “I’m gonna keep you in love with me for awhile,” which are written and performed by The National in the song, “Dark Side of the Gym.”

© The Acentos Review 2019