My Other Name

begins with a C. The best thing
I have left that I own in secret. Lost

whole days in the hallway of Hotel
Zaza. By the time we reached room 315,
lost years ages eight through 20.

If I take back the first blow job, I’d have to take
back all the years that went with it, which equals

a childhood. Including the one for the man who
freed me. I was worth keeping, as long as I’m not

seen. In the ER, she asked me if I was in immediate danger.
How’s somebody gonna answer that?

Danger belongs to the people who’ve been thrown
against the wall and been pieced back together.

In this story, I detonated the room until everything shattered
and I let the pieces lie and break underfoot,

get carried away on the bottom of so many women’s
and men’s shoes. If I get to keep anything, belong to

anything, it is that crack of myself against a hard rock.
There is no spell or prayer to undo

this break. I’ve made sure of it,
unreachable by any means.

I am that shadowed part of the earth
that holds up the lit part. This run-ragged-

without-shoes that flows flush in everyone.
I make them shimmer.

Now here on the corner of Fannin and Main,
outside the hospital, I erase the map
to my body

& with each passing car.

—

Leslie Contreras Schwartz’s new collection of poems, Nightbloom & Cenote (St. Julian Press, May 2018), was a semi-finalist for the 2017 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, judged by Ilya Kaminsky. She is also the author of Fuego, a collection of poems about difficult pregnancies, raising children while recovering from a history of abuse as a child, and the perspectives of children. She was a finalist for the 2018 Houston Poet Laureate. Her fiction will be included in the Houston Noir anthology, edited by Gwendolyn Zepeda (Akashic Press, 2019).