After Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Oh all right we can have sex
even though I have a headache.
Or remember that time in college
when we had sex despite my
visual migraine and I forever associated
your nakedness with blindness?
If I could choose, I’d take more talk,
less sight, some sex. The best
thing about your voice is it makes
me want to fuck you. The worst
thing about your voice is it gives
me a headache, Kara.
At the hot springs, you carried on
about the semiotics of divorce.
At the hot springs, I was graced
by the emperor’s advances.
Sor Juana fucked Spain, she fucked
god and the sonnet in a convent
in a colony and was accused of heresy.
I suspect Carnival and Lent equally.
They’re like rug burn or the aging
emperor’s anticipation of god. Sometimes,
when the kingdom is very quiet
and I am pacing the aisles of a store
forgetting what I came for, I hear
my mother call my name and reach
for a stranger’s pant leg. In the colonies,
a woman-screech, a gimp shopping cart;
something squeaky and undriveable.