Cuerpo y Culpa – a poem by Emily Rodgers-Ramos

Cuerpo y Culpa		
						-for Sonia

I’m always confusing Jueves y javes,
Thursday and keys.

Or abogados y albondigas,
lawyers and meatballs.

and I always stop 
and think about cuerpo
y culpa; which is body?
which is fault?

When your body was
mostly bone, you were thirsty. 
I plugged a straw with my finger, 
dribbled water into your parted 
lips. You coughed, you sputtered,

your bones shook like 
bamboo wind chimes.  
Lo siento! Lo siento, 
es mi culpa! I said.
I’m sorry! I’m sorry, 
it’s my fault!

(A fault line in 
the Himalayas is 
1300 miles long.)

No, Mali, you creaked,
the effort for English costing you
all the coins left in your pocket, 
No, Mali. Nothing is your fault.

A fault myself, then,
a chasm, filling with groundwater, 
my ribs curling into cliff, 

into shoreline. 
I am a lake now, 

a reservoir. 
I go there, to myself.
I fish, dangling my 
legs over the edge; I
reel in compassion. 
I make a meal of it.

Emily Rodgers-Ramos is the author of a YA novel, Riding the Double Helix; and Hyphen, a poetry collection. Her poems have appeared in the The Dry Creek Review, The Greyrock Review, Nanny Fanny, The Lilliput Review, The Progenitor Art and Literary Journal: Speak Peace, Chiaroscuro: An Anthology of Virtue and Vice, Exception/All: an anthology exploring what it means to be normal, and Gut Punch Literary.