The Leaking Roof of Time by Yessica Martinez  

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Who’s parting?—El Flaco, my father. 

As if I were in a casket, he contemplates my sleep. 

My so-sticky-sweet father 

does not wake me with a kiss. Ghosting me 

without spooking my dreams,  

light on his feet, 

my room without door-knob, 

without door,

parting a blanket, he exits. 

My father, skinny as a straw, 

has entered the black hole at the border. 

He does not call tomorrow, not after-

tomorrow. Tomorrow, a month. 

In El Salvador, a straw’s called pajilla, 

in Mexico, popote,

when my father says pitillo, 

a federal drinking pepsi deports him

to Tecún Umán 

where there’s a bridge over a river: 

Suchiate. Time does not drink 

that sweet water 

of flowers—through pitillos, 

through popotes, 

through pajillas, it slurps    

only great distances traveled. 

El que tenga tienda que la atienda. 

My father sold La Familiar to Don Hernan 

for the smuggling fee. His book of lending is now mine.   

I pencil what he owes me: four kisses, three bites.    

He crosses back to Mexico, hidden like the 9 

mm he kept stashed (I touched it once) 

in a bag of rice. 

With my mother, I walk a yellow bridge to The Star,

pray to the virgin of Chiquinquirá. Same virgin 

my mother knelt for, stitched up, 

three days after the light 

at the hospital first blacked out

then pulled me with forceps. 

Chinca who once, moldy and damp, 

restored her own damaged portrait. 

My father, a wetback, 

when will she restore his fading image? 

I want to patch 

the leaking roof of time. 

The more my father disappears 

the more I repaint the pilgrimage 

of this image: I pass a yellow bridge to The Star.

When will I pass by my father? 

He left in my sleep. Thrown in the creek 

are slashed tires, 

verinche-stained mattresses, 

but this stench is effervescence, a love-

sweet-bubbly 

burped through spacetime. 

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Yessica Martinez is a Queens-based poet originally from Medellin, Colombia. She is an illegalized person who currently holds Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status. A graduate of Cornell University’s MFA program, she is at work on a poetry collection titled Aircraft. 

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30 October 2023