Anthony Guerra Flores
Anthony Guerra Flores was born in Chapel Hill, NC, to Salvadoran immigrants. He is an undergraduate student at UNC Chapel Hill who is double majoring in Journalism in the Hussman School and English and Comparative Literature Creative Writing: Poetry Track. For him, poetry and storytelling did not come from reading. Instead, much of the craft was always present through the historias y dichos his mother and father would tell him. Much of it was about their early life in El Salvador and their diasporic experience as immigrants in the United States. For him, this was poetry, and his poems center around the witnessing of such experiences, personal evocation of memory, and the retelling of their dichos and his own to relate this similar experience among a broader Latinx community he belongs to.
Love like God's
Like petals, star fragments reflected in shards.
It’s my papá falling down the stairs, hitting his head,
another weekend of Chente and reminders,
of regret, or tears
on crimson-glass shards
dreams I’ve trampled.
Idiota, hijueputa, traidor
Bottles being thrown like artillery,
At my father who’s too drunk to duck
Incoming bombs of glass.
Spit mixed with piss and beer,
With repeated promises
Stained on carpet stairs.
A man, my dad, blackout drunk, passed out.
His skin marked purple by my mother,
Painting him like he’s a canvas,
Brushstrokes, detail
An Ironfist of love;
I want to believe she loves him.
And maybe this is what love is.
Love like a fist to your shoulder, chest, and face.
And maybe that’s what being a man is.
Taking this love like a man.
Paint me like a mother.
He clings onto you like a man.
And he rests his head on you,
Drunk as shit, bruised, and in love.
And yes, she holds him like she held God,
arm around his bloody face, hand in his beer-bathed hair,
like an angel, that’s how he first saw her.
So, he rests his head on her left breast, underneath her wing.
And tomorrow he will wake up without remembering.
He will make his café, kiss his wife, greet his son,
He will wake up wondering why tears stained his eyes,
Why his throat reminisces of drunken yelling,
Why there’s a neat pile of glass like the mountains of El Salvador.
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Image by Suzy Hazelwood from Pexels
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