Odes to Pedro

Sarah Rolinski

I.  Pedro Páramo

You, blessed with delicate skin and fragile teeth,
lie under Comala, unable to touch the soil you once loved.
You, my dear Pedro
suffocate under turmoil,
hearing the whores chatter
about under their tombstones,
wishing to breathe above
the barren plains, you rise,
veins in your hands strangling your skin,
you hear the saints murmur,
you run to your lover
to find her buried
under the layers of women.

II.  Pedro Ruiz

You, my dear Pedro,
drown in the crowd of butterflies
that wrap around your throat,
kiss your thin skin,
whisper under the fluttering of their blue wings,
collapse at the sky above,
full of life, surrounding
you like the eye of a hurricane.
Everything will collapse
when night falls. It is day now,
wrap yourself in banana leaves,
hear the insects howl, let them lull you
into a trance,
watch every crack in their bodies illuminate.

III.  Pedro López

You have no face,
you only have your name.
Your hands are of lace and silk;
you’re a small one.
You’ve belittled him,
put your arms around
him only to pull him to the ground.

My dear Pedro,
have you found the truth under that girl’s skin
after you’ve ripped her apart like a scavenger finding
a corpse?
You are clay, lie back into the earth,
claw at the top of your coffin.
You won’t find her.

SARAH ROLINSKI is a junior at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) in New Orleans, LA and specializes in Creative Writing. She has been published in Steel Toe Review and The Noisy Island, and won second place in the Pinkie Gordon Lane Poetry Contest. She has also placed several times in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Her favorite genres are fiction and screenplays.