Ode to Andi at Phillips 66

By ​Andrés López

You call me                honey
but I’m drunk
with no money, no way
to pay back
you free-donut-favor
or the coolant spill
I left in the car emergency aisle
which you had to clean, not knowing
it was me.

Inconsiderate cause I was
two-fold & twenty &
the blabbering me
was not the real me
unless I was real tipsy
& started spitting
I love you’s
 I’m sorry’s 
 
But dare I say that
drunk me is still real me
as reckless love is still            real love.

​On the stoop after
my accidental godzilla tirade
on the bank of wiper fluids
 
you let me smoke
while liquor tears welled.

---

For Ken Moody

By ​Andrés López

Photographers photograph what they love, or what they are attracted to… they all fetishize what they love. Bruce Weber fetishised those white boys with perfect bodies, and Robert fetishised black men. He objectified them.

for not showing
too much to
 
Mapplethorpe
attracted to
ghetto men & you knew
that you were not
that. That snob
was a fitting title
for you since you were
glamorous & left
 
ways of living
for his g-string                fetishisation
                                   de-fetishisation or                                because you felt beautiful
                                                                                                   without his intention of sex
                                                                                                   just beautiful.

But I was flattered that he wanted to photograph me so much… The fact that someone thought that I was
beautiful
was something that I held on to.
I was so flattered.
                                                     — Ken Moody*

*Quoted from “Being Mapplethorpe’s Muse” in AnotherManMag

---

)

By ​Andrés López

Your back: bending paratheses.
My foot
placed over your
twenty-sixth
spinal link.
Tailbone facing
my nose-bulb
pointing higher
and higher
cause we want
            to be good to each other.
Even when your forearms
drag forward
your fresh sheets.
Sheets
fitted
pull
from the corners
of the mattress.
 
& what we believe
to be our most sensitive
skin, the elbows
& knees
chafes into rugburn-love, pension-promise, passion-merge.

---

Ode to the old woman across

the street who assumes

I am a gardener

By ​Andrés López

​with a shit-smear on the back
of her pants, asking us to move
our cars, since she cannot drive back
wards or let us pull
broadleaves without assumption.
Her knit hat-bulb swats
flies in the meantime, spins
her around, off-balance, pulling
the ruds of her neck taut
smooth. Revealing
butter knife ridges, firm,
implanted in her skin and
indented just below the point
of her chin—narrowed
looking into the sun,
which she too thinks
is hers.

---

​Andrés López is an undergraduate writer studying English and Women & Gender Studies in Lincoln, NE. Andrés’s work covers queerness, Latinidad, familial grief, and survival in Midwest America. He is nominated for Best of the Net 2027 and has been published in Tough Poets Review, &Change, dreamboybookclub, Queer Poem-a-day, and more. His forthcoming work will be seen in GUTMAG and WREATH, among others.