Blender Poem by Alex Salinas

As in dreams, as in life, in steaming black coffee
The faces fade, the bodies fade, heat fades

She critiqued Bolaño's books saying they lean
Toward self-destruction & she was right

'Everything points to death, ' she said
And then I kissed her soft white neck

I slept sleepless for a week straight &
Thought, If I go away for a good while

The voices in my head become colorless
As if time is the Great Blender

I remember drinks my mother used to shake
Slush the color of tapioca, or was it bright green?

I dreamt of becoming tall like my maternal grandfather
And he was the first to enter back into the dirt

I think of how Dante dreamt of Virgil
And how I daydream of Bolaño's dangling

Cigarette saluting the ground on which he trampled
My dirt, his dirt, the earth of Latin America

I'm not Latin American—not American
I'm the color wedged between two maps.