Joshua Garcia
Libretto
Does his spirit rouse the dust
of memory from your sleep?
It moves on me in the night,
at times gently, others unto stillness.
The maestro embellishes our voices
with accompanying parts.
His passions simmer in the pit.
Turandot! Ours is a dress of white
no matter the blood on our fingers.
Snow covers the path we arrived on.
When the curtains part, whose voice breaks
to command the silence of men?
THE POET
You think we’re the same? Shame
how your imagination latches onto bodies—
mine a phantom also. I disappear
when the prima donna undresses
& lays down my bridal frock
for her singular confidence.
I only exist as men have written me.
You would do better to model yourself
after Callas: learn, suffer, mature.
Go for a walk, wander in the rain,
fuck whomever you want to—or not.
The snow melting in your boots.
TURANDOT
I want to know how it feels to hold a blade
to willing men’s throats.
The first time I had sex, my body lost feeling.
It was total. Graceless.
Touch registered through the eyes.
He said, Clean yourself off.
You see, we performed a kind of dance,
held our gaze to a fixed point to keep from growing sick.
Barthes writes of a beloved annihilated by love itself.
It takes practice, the balance between
possession & surrender—predetermined
& executed by our own hands.
THE POET
You are more like the maestro than you think,
peddling your loneliness as if anyone needs
more than their natural share.
You will not find your denouement here.
Close your mouth & taste it: Io sono. I am.
Feel the vowels on your tongue. Suono. Sound.
You think you don’t want to be touched?
Listen for the murmur in your skin.
You can be whomever you want to be.
Isn’t it always reaching?
See what falls from the guillotine.
Bring it to me.
TURANDOT
Winter passes through double panes
to fill my apartment with its icy dramas.
Our bodies are a permeable room.
At the ballet, I think of you as I watch two dancers
mirror each other—Spiegel im Spiegel—
like hawks circling in the sky, separately
until they meet in a concentric orbit.
The dancer lifts his partner above him: spellbound,
arms outstretched, her chest extends.
It’s unclear whether the sun will set or rise.
Were he to let her go, she would either fly or be cast off,
depending on who you’re inclined to believe.
THE POET
Who do you believe? Poet,
we are not keeping the same time.
Each night I am amplified until hope dies
at curtain call. Morning’s endlessness
scorns me until the illusion resumes
& intimacy is lifted from my throat.
How we feel pleasure: first pain, then release.
If you continue to study me,
know this—the thrill of being carried
is not the sense of flight but of being let go.
Your feet across the ground,
the music still playing.
TURANDOT
Joshua Garcia is the author of Pentimento (Black Lawrence Press, 2024), a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the Thom Gunn Award. His poems have appeared in Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Passages North, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the College of Charleston and has received a Stadler Fellowship from Bucknell University, an Emerge—Surface—Be Fellowship from The Poetry Project, and support from the Hawthornden Foundation. He lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York.