Citric Acid
An Online Orange County Literary Arts Quarterly of Imagination and Reimagination
Husband
by Gustavo Hernandez
Despite the times we couldn’t decide
how to answer, we went on.
For instance, that spring, on the road home
from Arizona, when the thundering sky began
to unseat itself and we felt the desert
in California come up and ask us
for a definition.
I’d realized by then we’d never know
how to pin it down, never know
what we needed. I—
at that point—just needed you
to join me in saying that
lovers like us want
to be called, to call each other,
different things:
Hunk / Honeycomb
Heart / Habitat
Things that can be blurred, if necessary, expanded.
Yuzuko's Christmas Card
by Gustavo Hernandez
The edges I would like for you to gild
in plastic. Holly, heaven and nature
all from a First Street dollar store.
Above, the sad winter sun and my dad,
not yet forty, guiding me
from every sharp thing in the yard,
from fooling with his mother’s canaries,
to his brother. Maybe wondering
from where the instincts of a childless person
come. Just look at him. The uncle.
Despite the loss and the wild untethered
weight of calling the shots to his own
growing up, he offers his big flannelled arms
and joy like a sudden umbel
of butterfly weed. Now the busy street
and its modified mufflers, now
the house and my body and his body
weigh less than a handful of seed.
Bachelor
by Gustavo Hernandez
Useless now to turn to thoughts of winning
the day back. Outside, the dirt gray backwash
against the curbs—how sad it is to brush
away the empties. You and You and you
who may by now be on the other side
of Broadway, I don’t feel like making up
a new apology. Not when this kiss
was unavoidable. Not when this heat
and this man’s words hit like Jupiter-8 chords
and not when a new chord has been known
to bring entire cities back. Think of
blood in the body, of all the new ghosts
lined up at the edge of the sun’s western copper.
The things they’d give to be here now.
Gustavo Hernandez is the author of the poetry collection Flower Grand First (Moon Tide Press). His poems have been featured in Reed, Acentos Review, Sonora Review and The Slowdown podcast. He was born in Jalisco, Mexico and lives in Santa Ana, California.