poetry, summer 2024
OVERWLEM,
A COLONIAL SWARM
Summer of 2023 was the time of flies. Dawning into our neighborhoods, touching every
orifice of our sense of self, becoming an enzyme decomposing our hope. Their squirming
children arose in hoards, outgrowing our capacity to resist. Our children swapped their toy
swords for fly swatters, running through suburbia with newly minted slaying skills protecting
what was once ours, what now belongs to them. Flies do not borrow. We borrowed paradise
from a fig tree. A ripe fruit word ferdous pops out of your lips and rides the breath until
your teeth unleash a burst birthing the slithering snake from its boom. It means garden, not
like an orchard but like the labyrinth of laundry we hung in our yards. Every rope a vine,
every baby gown a sprouted leaf. My cousin called just as I was grabbing mail. She saw fly
shadows haunting the screen. “It’s terrible here, it’s hell.” She lamented from across a collapsing
ocean talking of Lahaina burning, families unable to find each other, water rerouted to resorts,
the tourism industry protecting the eroding pockets of vacationers.
Their crisis set mold on my inconvenience.
Inconvenience is the birthplace of crisis.
Buzzing flies whispered prophesy in my ears. Thumbing through my mail I find
an overripe electricity bill. I sniff downwind air from the resort. A faint smell of insecticide.
&
tricksternometry
1+1
There is Coyote in the shape of me
holding a clay pot, collecting rainwater
I wish it had a hole. There is acid in the
rain, or so the non-locals say. The pot
will not hold, it will melt soon.
2+1
Coyote takes the full pot to Badger's home.
“What will I do with a pot of drowning
water?” She asks her husband. “I do
not know,” I reply. Coyote and Badger hold
hands and tip over the rainwater.
3-1
Every droplet is a memory.
∞
I want to dissolve the rain into salt. May
it protect the ghosts in my wounds.
0∞
Nothing pours out.
1+1
Coyote wants to crack the cistern. “It’s less
damage,” we say.
√I
We are no longer coyote-shaped. I slither to
the shards wanting to forget how to collect
rainwater. Seeking other places to drown.
CAMILLE HERNANDEZ
is an author and trauma-informed education specialist. She calls herself a literary doula: tenderly providing readers with the strength to birth the unnamed vocabularies of our deepest ache to find pathways towards our collective liberation. Her poetry was nominated for The Best of the Web and the Pushcart Prize. Her debut book, The Hero and the Whore, debuted as Amazon’s #1 new release in the sociology of abuse genre. She lives in Anaheim, CA with her family.