Two Poems by Steven Cordova
KISSING MARY M.
I kissed him to move the narrative along
to a climax as messy as any story ending
in human sacrifice.
I kissed him for thirty silver coins. I was poor
& I had walked beside him a long way
from my home.
I kissed him because the devil entered me
& he wanted him, too. The devil wanted him
most of all.
I kissed him, betrayed him as he betrayed me:
He thought I hadn’t seen him, but I had:
He was kissing Mary M.
ENDOGENIZATION
“…many species, including humans, exhibit remnants of other
retroviruses in their genomes that question such possible
endogenization of HIV.”
“Endogenization?—
as in homogenization?”
“No, not like homogenization.
Though it is a process.”
“Endogenization?
as in homo-genization?”
“No, not like that at all,
whatever ‘homo-genization’ is.
“Must you
always think that way?”
“Which way would that be?”
……………..“Pink.”
“Yes, pink—I must
always think pink.”
“Fine, then.
Let’s move on:
Endogenization
as in immigration,
as in integration,
as in letting in
what once you fought to keep out.”
“Endogenization as in hospitality,
the hospitality Sodom lacked,
the lack for which it burned.”
Steven Cordova’s full-length collection of poetry, Long Distance, was published by Bilingual Review Press in 2010. His poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Bellevue Literary Review, Callaloo, The Journal and Northwest Review. He reviews fiction and nonfiction for Lambda Literary. From San Antonio, TX, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.
I am struggling with “Kissing Mary M”, not because I am a person of faith, but because it seems muddled in its purpose. Even taken as a work of fiction, in spite of its obvious allusion to Judas and Jesus, it does not seem convincing that one person would betray another to death because of mere hypocrisy. Or, if one would, and, say, there is a spurned lover motif, why the three stanzas naming other objectives? Among other things, the Judas in the Bible was not poor. If it is meant to shock people like me, its Judas fails to have the pathos of, for example, Pilate in Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita”, or the sensuality of a poem such as “Noche Oscuro”. And its Jesus does not seem to be more than a dismal kind of garden variety hypocrite, bearing none of the angst of the Jesus of “The Last Temptation of Christ”.