You Got McDonald's Money?, and: San Zenon Repents
Rent from DeepDyve- You Got McDonald's Money?, and: San Zenon Repents
You Got McDonald's Money?
I don't even want you to look at nothing, so you gotta go in there with your eyes closed.
bernie mac
My father told me two things, a religion of sorts. Don't eat these white folks' food when there's food in the house and Stop starving yourself, you making it look like I don't feed you. And he did. For years I did not dream of empty, but chose it in the name of purity. I learned hunger and whiteness in the same place. I know how to refuse and not mean it, the only evidence a fist beneath the table, four half-moons sitting in my empty palm. Everything my mouth does is a sin, a windowless church swallowing the breeze. I drip No thank you by instinct, then flood back into myself. If I'm hungry, I'm nobody's child. If I never kissed the fingers of a foreign hand, I would have made for an exceedingly small casket. I still might.
San Zenon Repents
The Hurricane of San Zenon struck Santo Domingo on September 3, 1930. Three weeks prior, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo had been sworn in as president, and he cemented his thirty-year dictatorship in the aftermath of San Zenon, which leveled most of the capital and killed six thousand Dominicans.
Did you think a saint can't weep?me and all my burly weather yo creo que tu no entiendes [End Page 136] what exactly yo soy I saw him el Diablo jefe
His hands spotted whitebleach splayed across waterclouds before a storm pues tu crees en Dioshow else my name then?
What is a saint to do but gather what he canin his lipless mouth? howl prayers against what standsin his path? el mensaje was a failurehe came lo siento para eso
Te amo te amo te amolove is the velocity at which I ruinI never wanted you deadjust elsewhere mi querido 6000if only you knew what he would namethe rubble I could not raptureinto my slick halo
But saints are made in the leavingmy electric arms undoneTrujillo rebuilt each houseand named it his rebuilt la islaen Ciudad Trujillo I am told in good weatherall the clouds look just like his hands [End Page 137]
Julian Randall is a poet from Chicago. He has received fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT, and the Watering Hole and was the 2015 National College Slam (CUPSI) Best Poet. Randall is the curator of Winter Tangerine Review's Lineage of Mirrors. He is an mfa candidate at Ole Miss. His first book, Refuse, is the winner of the 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and will be published by U of Pittsburgh Press.
