Harpocrates

Gabriel Miranda

The cost of love is my voice. Hands covered in oil and release scour welted skin syncopating along the sheets — arhythmic as my words you devoured. I learned loneliness is more ravenous than the hunger of a sunless child grown in a whorl of calamitous thrush. Hunger offers the starved no choice. Beneath the diaphanous petal you rose the red from within me, I bled for a promise proposed: You’d love me as long as the silence lasts — my lips fluttered close desperate as the gods that turned from my tilted glass. sharp the shape your mouth makes on my hips white teeth barred you roll my skin between incisor and number 22 meant now for angels rather than gods though divinities loose meaning in the cracks along asphalt and much like poetry, we’ve become nothing more than disjointed aphorisms posing as truth yes, I know that love tastes like rain besides the bitter end yes I know love feels like lonely nights on a bench warmed by pigeons yes I know love is an open sore oozing grief and wordless trysts yes I know love is seated beside me at the clinic waiting for results that will only tell me I’m alone again with an added bottle of pills but don’t worry it’s not fatal not anymore perhaps I’ll open the sore myself and revive rhythms meant for the poems of the past in the way you’d thrust into me. I, too, somehow still believe in divinity.

Gabriel Miranda is an emergent two-spirit Puerto Rican poet and religious anthropologist living in NYC. He has won a first place prize at Empyrean Literary Magazine for poetry, has published in two literary journals, and wrote as a poet in residence at Woodward Residency. He spends his days contemplating the threads between what was ancient and is now modern as he weaves a new dream of creative expression.