Kevin A. Gonzalez

Iowa Dialectic

“Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.

There is no happiness like mine.

I have been eating poetry.”

—Mark Strand

Iowa puts the shhh in workshhhop. The ha!

in trocha!c. The nest of synesthesia, Iowa

is the Energizer Bunny of metaphor. Iowa

is as historic as pita bread. Iowa

is not beautiful, exactly. It is beautiful,

inexactly. Ask the grads: Iowa

not only swelled the ego of my allegory,

it extended the rope of my trope!

Ask the profs: At Iowa, we lobby

for the emancipation of the ampersand!

At Iowa, we teach you

the second person! The transitional

phrase! You’ve been feeding

thread to the fissures of your old poems.

You’ve been hanging them like animal skins

in your closet. You will eat them when the ink

ferments & paper becomes jerky. Nowadays,

it is unfit to eat raw poetry. In other words,

you cannot write what you want to say—

? & ? Sitting in a tree

Double you / are / I / tee / eye / end / gee

First ?’s craft / Then ?’s stature

Scheming the Nobel Prize in Litter / ature

Is this language enough for you? Mr. Strand,

I could not digest the middle section

of your book. Iowa, if only you’d let me in,

I could conclude this poem, I am ever

so closer now / than I was at the title /

to death. Or, Right now is the closest /

I’ve gotten to the end / and even my elbows /

want to cry.

Cerro Maravilla

On July 25th 1978, two young Puerto Rican independence activists, Carlos Soto Arrivi and Arnaldo Dario Rosado, were murdered in a police ambush at Cerro Maravilla outside of Ponce, Puerto Rico. It was later known in a senate investigation that they were enticed into bombing a TV tower on top of the Cerro Maravilla Mountain by an undercover agent. The Paramaunt Pictures film “A Show of Force,” is based on these events.

Everything started as a bad eighties movie—

a villain who forgot to apply the hair gel of tact,

two victims slipping from the monkey-bar of existence,

a man whose arm is full of helium

& a journalist who lugs beneath her skirt

a grief vending-machine. A cover-up

like the doormat on a ghost ship’s platform.

We’re talking tropical island—even the arrangements

of sand had flags pinned to their chests.

We’re talking non-fiction—the Governor

passing down orders like musty apricots—

& fiction—her proud teeth, uncarved tombstones

reserved for future lovers. We’re talking meta—

Carlos & Arnaldo, these couplets, as somber

as two men shaking hands in a cemetery,

as potent as the twin holes of a baseboard outlet.

Even through their tinted glass and trademark labels,

the beer bottles saw it clearly, heaped along

the skids of grass in the outskirts of Ponce.

It was 1978 & my father, yes, my father

worked for the government, motions scattered

on his desk like seeds. Terrorists, they said.

Even Amy Irving & Robert Duvall say murder,

& what do gringos know, their skin poisoned red

by our sun? A matchbox was found in their possession—

no handbook to light the moon’s wick, no palette

to seethe the orange eloquence of twilight.

My father came home early the next morning

& the doorknobs—No comment—trembled—No

comment—like the eardrums of the triggerman.