Blaine Tolentino was born on a very full moon in 1987 and raised in Kailua and Ko‘olina on O‘ahu in Hawai‘i. She graduated with a bachelors degree in English from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in 2009. Under the name ‘societyofanimals’, Blaine blogs poetry and occasional recommendations of art, books and music.
The assertion of echoes
on Catholic school nuns
is as such: as the peacock
drags, tarnishes its lovely
tail on earth, so bundles
up priesthoods of rules
and riddles to crack and tarnish
the wet skin of heathens
in fourth grade.
My father drove me to school,
because my mother was lousy
with a depression (brought on
by AIDS death of uncles
and friends). She fell asleep
when the sun came up, when
I packed up my last spelling bee
and wrestled milk toward
the stomach and anonymous bowels
that existed and pumped and erred
but couldn’t be seen, so might as well
have been a machine with small
friends pumping cogs on wheels.
On the way, my father played
Patsy Cline from a tape that was stuck
in the mouth of the car’s body –
my cousin was there, in a matching
red plaid, starched and criss-crossed
on strappy backs – she could prove
this all happened, if called upon.
We fought the repertoire for a long
while, forming political opinions
on old music and continual discontent
– we would not be silenced.
After a while, though, because
the songs were the only thing we heard,
we knew all the words and all
of the bad things she felt about
men with cars and other women
and how everything would hurt us.
Delinquents of the night, they shuttered and swayed
on my front porch with purple Jesus, grape juice
and vodka in a mason jar singing. Swing the quartz
grasp and glow.
Delinquents of the night, they painted and prayed
my face into Aztecs and Mayans battling across my eyes
and into the dark night, on that bridge by the graveyard,
on that staircase of hobos and travelling musicians.
Delinquents of the night, they haunted and harrowed
each other from separate rooms, birdcall disaster
and grasping the handle to jump out and scare
bystanders, beautiful virgins right out of their clothes.
Delinquents of the night, they tremble and tumble
themselves into bed, easing the ache of wild highs
and chasing thunder around the apartment with tomahawks.
Feverous feuds could go on toward the morning
infinitely.