ALEXANDRIA DELCOURT

SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE

I.

In my dreams, the bones beneath my feet can talk.

Everywhere I go, I am indigenous to somewhere else.

I amble your crimson clay city, a ghost tangling human streets

around spurs of memory: there is nothing new here.

When pink spires twist, it is the build of history, shadows falling

over the only beautiful thing left from the old days: some spoiled

Juniper nostalgia whispering about love,

likening us air-breathers to prehistoric graves.

II.

Let’s make a trade: the vines you weave into my hair

for the whistle of my sight through your refracted drought.

Try. My body,

corroded Catholic brick, can withstand anything.

Even these short-lived city dogs have seen this all before:

my hands on your chest raise ghosts from their forced slumbers.

The hounds howl at their eerie resonance, echoes of prayer

from those who dreamed black corn cities into existence,

famished eyes begging for solidness through purpling mist.

The galleon was formidable here once. Gold still ripples

beneath sidling transparencies of time,

beneath rooftop landscapes - gray where dusk is stealing

color from sunset adobe mountains,

and all the while, laughing

birds soar over those cathedral bells again

like the lighting of one hundred imperfect stars.

Alexandria Delcourt received her MFA from the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing Program in 2014. She currently teaches Creative Writing and English in the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Her work has appeared in Written River, Poetry Quarterly, As/Us: A Space for Women of the World, Kalyani Magazine, FULCRUM: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics, Aster(ix), Cream City Review, and other publications. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.