End It on This
What did I do. Did I fly——did I powerlift——did I
draw. Did I draw myself and my house and my father.
Did the house have a green trim. Did I call the green trim
Walden Pond. Did I play you. Did I buy you lunch
by the ocean. Did I walk you around
with my index finger in your mouth. Did I time the kiss.
Was I paying attention to the song in the background
all along. Was that it. Was that the point of it all.
That I fell in love. That I wrote it down on a parking lot ticket.
Gigolo / Lexicon
It’s an art asking when a husband will be home.
Asking rhetorically if it isn’t true
that fear was the first
of mankind’s purities.
I have never really cared for purity.
In school I bit down hard on the corners
of The Pilgrim’s Progress
and every coming-of-age novel
I was assigned. My English
teacher once told me my name
sounded like strength
with a sense of humor.
Humor, she said, and handed me
an over-xeroxed Mostellaria.
She told me to clamp down
on language. That I’d need it.
And I have. Quite often.
Bachelor
In one of the black and white films my mother watches,
José Venegas plays a man known only as El Bronco.
In black he leads a town into sin through the mouth
of a cabaret. In another film, Meche Barba dances
under a white perfumy pseudonym. The men at her hips
are announced only as her satellites. Hired to smile
and to mimic her movement. Slick and rehearsed.
I tell my mother that is the only way I want to know how to love.
Passion through discipline. The lobby piano.
The note played and the note only suggested. The master
of ceremonies who is paid to describe the night as glossy black,
whose eyes in the last of the glossy black say nothing to you
other than Ladies and Gentlemen, that was the show.
Gustavo Hernandez is the author of the poetry collection Flower Grand First (Moon Tide Press, 2021) and Bachelor (FlowerSong Press, October 2025). In January 2024, Hernandez was appointed Poet Laureate of Orange County, California. He was born in Jalisco, Mexico and was raised in Santa Ana, California, where he still resides. His favorite feud is the 1986 feud between Joan Rivers and Johnny Carson.
