Here I Am Hoping To Take the Quiet Off You

by Alexia Marmara

Something about how I was brought back to life by an ongoing investigative research project bringing a late artist back to life

It was just the other day that I told a room of  people I feel punctured by your paintbrush. 

I said I wonder about your voice. Your hands. Which parts of your face the sun liked to hit.

What size clothes you wore would you have liked mine and the jingle of my bracelets 

would you have wanted to braid yourself into a Beach Boys song with me  and have me tie your shoelaces 

I don’t know how to stop thinking about your bone marrow 

was your blood red or was it your favourite colour 

What’s your favourite colour, Froylán?

Mon soupirant,

I’ve started to wonder about this new language

that I speak now

The ways I’ve made staggered attempts to paint your face

like how when I write about you I will your face to paint itself onto mine when in fact

all I have is a jive made of the aches you slowly sew inside me

I know little things about your birth and your death, 

Moments that shaped you and others that held you.

 I know about the people that danced with

the memory of you when already you were gone

What’s your favourite colour, Froylán?

What size brushes did you use? 

A fan brush? Hog bristle? Nylon?

Which one did you hold to paint your favourite colour?

Your ill feelings, sad feelings, lonely feelings, did they have a name? 

Did you listen to them did you speak to them did you let them win? Where did they go, 

these feelings? Did they lodge themselves inside your paintings? 

Should I speak of them, Froylán?

Is it them, those feelings that spoke to me not you speaking because I’m not a man not a gay man

but I used to like to party and then I lost my hair 

how much longer until I know your favourite colour?

Can I call you Froy?

I wonder about a story when it stops beating. 

Did yours ever? Why were you made to go quiet? the way I obsess, is this story a quiet one?

a photo of your painting possessed me

The painting possessed me you possessed me what’s your favourite colour, Froylán?

I can’t find words for what it is I’m doing

 I’m searching I’m correcting I’m hoping your story will feel warm again 

In English I try I try harder in Spanish I can’t find it in French either

What’s our language, Froylán, will others speak it with us when I finish poking at these bloated fantasies

What’s your favourite colour, Froylán?

It’s written in our contract that I stay 33 years behind you

What’s this wicked way we walk together can anyone see the pair of us 

or is it just that I think myself something of a necromancer 

I took my gloves off to feel you it’s wrong to say that I’m in love with you but

You can’t puncture me and leave

look at this bicep, Froylán, am I stronger than most because I can resurrect?

Is it me that’s haunting you?

Is that your favourite colour, Froylán?

Why did history behave that way towards your story towards you 

towards the magic you embalmed in each of your strokes

a name as beautiful as yours a brush as beautiful as yours a mundo interior as beautiful as yours.

 But what’s your favourite colour, Froylán?

You’ve been the biggest thing on my mind for the past few years 

Why don’t I know your favourite colour?

What made you go quiet?  What made you go still?

I went still I was made to be still. 

Me and my spirit we were still beating but the world it tamed my whisking

I make the living uncomfortable is what I was told

And my story it stopped coiling for a little more than a second when the good and the bad people they lost their care for me

They forgot like how I always forget the word locura until someone says it to me and I see myself reflected in their eyes and mierda do I like it

But for all my bone defects and the things gone missing inside my cranium,

you,

it was you, 

you found me 

Within knots of space and time you reached out you might have even told me 

you would like to braid yourself into a Beach Boys song with me 

Or is it weird that I’ve said that twice now

but who cares about the strange

The way I make others feel became non existent in the chamber that makes you and I

What’s my favourite colour, Froylán?

Une ronde endiablée et j’en ai la bougeotte 

because you’re never still with me. 

Your story it keeps gravitating

Here I am hoping to take the quiet off you. 

I’m still wondering about your favourite colour.

I won’t let you go still again Froylán I hate the days that I’m still and my friends stop calling

I hate that you thought you had to stop beating. 

I want someone else to see you to learn from you to remember how much you learn from things that go quiet.

You silently tell me of all the ways we can live with this curse

This spell 

Un joli silence

Today I think I’m about to say something about braiding you into the Beach Boys three times now 

And I’m sorry but only just a little bit

because I stand here, stuck in your orbit

Not in my home but in yours not your language et pas ma langue non plus

I’ve poked at every library every book every signature 

J’ai cherché dans tous les recoins, à l’envers, à l’endroit

dehors dedans partout

I’ve mapped every speck of the dust of you and hid it under my finger nails

I’m punctured still,  But actually I am unstill

And through you and all the people that care about you

and me and you 

and you 

and me perhaps not even with you 

I wonder about this new loveliest of chapters, 

The one in which I move towards you without punctuation

the one in which I know so much more than your favourite colour, Froylán.

featured photographs courtesy of Abelardo Ojeda