"Would It Kill Me to Be a Nicer Guy?" by Raquel Gutiérrez

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December 2, 2020  

Would It Kill Me to Be a Nicer Guy?


Raquel Gutiérrez

Insomniac for a high noon
called midnight. Another howling
Coyote ass chorus of disapproval—Malinche          
was my Farrah Fawcett poster          

no strap
              no thong

no tongue
              just hair

masculine taped to     my bedroom wall

an imagined papacito
in a big bad brown
teen lobo
den for real.

The gigalo furrowed browed
spittled jowls highlights yellow        

an estrangement with my pack
of sancho sinvergüenzas

swimming in lack
for Mommy Malinchismo

But we appreciate over time,
our bellies get full over time.
And     these papers     overwhelm an archive.

So for a good time call Cortez, a casual encounter. 
No strings attached
             cuando estoy triste I swipe right.

Copyright © 2020 by Raquel Gutiérrez. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 2, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Many poems in my manuscript are inspired by the story of José Olivares, a young laborer in 1870s Tucson, who was caught in a lover’s triangle and murdered by a hacendado for romancing the powerful landowner’s wife. I’m interested in the ways class intersects with desire and how both help contour the borderlands’ histories of colonization and racial capitalism.”
Raquel Gutiérrez

Raquel Gutiérrez is the author of Brown Neon, forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2022 and Southwest Reconstruction, forthcoming from Noemi Press in 2022. A 2017 recipient of the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, they run Econo Textual Objects, which publishes intimate works by QTPOC poets. They are a poet and writer based in Tucson, Arizona.
“The Pleasures of Fear” by Judith Ortíz Cofer
read more
 “three thousand lost kisses” by Andrés Montoya
read more

Thanks to Brian Blanchfield, author of Proxies: Essays Near Knowing (Nightboat Books, 2016), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read a Q&A about Blanchfield’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year
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