Hey, Aunt Libby

by Alex Salinas

Hey, Aunt Libby,

When I told you how good you looked

Without your wig,

Just your bald head,

And you told me told me

It’s always the guy’s fault

Why men and women fight,

Because you should know after two marriages,

And I should know too,

That’s probably why our coffee and donut holes

From Dunkin tasted so good,

Because there

In that packed lobby at eight o’clock on Sunday night,

All bets were off,

All wigs off,

We left it all on that wobbly, sticky little table,

And despite a bunch of kids and parents surrounding us

I gave zero f’s

Reading you Etheridge Knight’s

“Feeling Fucked Up,”

Because turns out we were really there to talk about our hearts,

And it was good hearing you laugh loud to such a sad poem,

Good for me to laugh with you,

Forget my pride, drown out

Whoever was listening in on us

Having, probably,

The best conversation in the house.

by Alex Salinas

Every morning, I wake up to find

about seven or eight rolly pollies 

scattered on my beige carpet,

some alive, some barely, some dead.

I used to approach them cautiously,

use paper towels to shield

my palms from their shells,

then throw them into the garbage.

O the damage that did.

When I finally decided to take matters

into my own hands, actually feel the

pellets of their bodies roll,

I stopped dumping them

into the trash and instead released

them to the patch of grass

outside my front door.

They say newborns need their

mother’s touch, skin-to-skin contact,

to help their brains produce the right

amount of hormones.

Adulthood is no different.

Walk into any state prison and stare

long enough into a convict’s eyes—

tell me what you find missing there.

They say we eventually become self-sufficient— 

logical, reasonable, responsible.

They say once we’re no longer children,

we’ve grown up.

This is the point at which we

lose touch, probably—forget the connections
we made when we were unafraid
of using our hands.