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i was born in a crystal angle
i was born next to an axe
i was born in the image of epidemic beings
who starve for the root & thirst for the crack
everything red in the halo
where roses burst
like a beaked savage dream like a white frightened hive
it was so hard to concentrate after i was born
though i nursed from a mare who discolored my eyes
she was not my mother
her eyes could sadden and sink into me
because she was not my mother
emaciated muscles throbbed as our cyst
clouds of dust bowels of the earth in a galloping swirl
“i don’t want to be another white feather
searing the ground”
the first words i thought and did not say
my overexpanded cry
to the mare who was not my mother
but fed me blood at nightbreak




born out of 515 years of superimposed lives
i stretch my wing like a blade and feel brazil in my side
it is pinto threatening to kill himself again
our lady of the apparition refracting black light
walls curved inward from the explosion of days
i would vomit xtian blood if pinto weren’t already doing it
arch of his back
ghetto in the sky
in the nest of mother jaguar, pinto’s feathers beam
an infrared that keeps
shedding wings of blood
crust i thought was sight

in mother jaguar’s eye-soul


she links my string of guts
she borrows pinto’s knife




jchrist is all bones when me and pinto hug him
there are worms floating off the ground
writhing in the mute night
everything is sad for jchrist
everything we say streaks the sky with fire
when, not if, the apparition of his mother materializes
black on the creekbed
indian on a trunk
an iphone’s throw away from
the hydroelectric dam
we will flit into her mouth
quaking throat that ripples
in the forcefield we will sound out
whatever is on the other side of sacrifice




the blood flowed in rivulets from my head
it was everything the eye of the spirit wanted
my blood and pinto’s blood
the jaw of a root in the earth
my dismembered wing, a standard growth
off a tree
there was a time
when me and pinto dared morph into toucans
but silhouettes in the bush
cosmic killers burned us out
they said
my heart was no cavity
for a dark bird
they said
my heart had stayed white
in the skydome

Lucas de Lima is the author of two chapbooks and the full-length Wet Land (Action Books), named one of the best poetry books of 2014 by Dennis Cooper, Entropy, Coldfront, The Volta, and Philadelphia Review of Books. As a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, he works on Amerindian thought and Latin American literature.