Pupusas

Reyes Ramirez

the pupusa is a portrait
            of an honest earth:
                        the coarse burns continents,
            the auroral dough a sea.
water joined masa through tumult
            & sphered, flattened then crowned,
                        filled with meat & milk then smoothed,
            heat birthed & bitten.
no, the pupusa is an homage
            to the laborer’s backhand
                        where scars simmer & settle,
            strawberry skin browns.
sweated flesh crackles on steaming metal,
            grease singing smoke loud then sweet over & over,
                        flipped & rested, an iris weepy then dry,
            ashen islands form & a back stiffens.
no, the pupusa is a documentation
            of every pecado,
                        the taut pink palate
            a receipt for indulgence.
a sheet of young wood pulp dims,
            then an emergence of weighty shadows.
                        a sycamore pith rises & splits
            & spits a globe of queso.
no, the pupusa is a bulging mirror
            to this sleepless face. examine
                        the wrinkle bowls under each eye & find
            another tired eye under another tired eye.
the cream sol bulges then sombers,
            sunspots & scabs black;
                        what can this light nourish
            but a body ripe with eonic exhaustion?
no, the pupusa is a portrait
            of this life, crusting & breaking
                        with every lick & tooth, the desire & gift
            of jarabe yielding to the shape of a belly.
crack open the soft disc egg
            & study its ivory thick blood & tender marron,
                        stretching like a timeline of grief,
            & lap the fresh veins.

What Keeps Us

Poems to Read in Community

Inspired by C. D. Wright’s poem “What Keeps,” we offer Reyes Ramirez’s “Pupusas” as part of a twenty-poem selection from poems we’ve featured in 2024—poems, like bread, that one might pass across the table—to a loved one, or to oneself. 

Read editor Lloyd Wallace’s introduction to the collection and statements from our staff readers hereRead poems by selecting below.

What Keeps

Some nights We stay up
passing it back and
forth
between us
drinking deep

Read >

This Era

Forests and cities

along the way sleep like huge dark churches.

Read >

Talisman

each of us bearing the art
in a curve of wing, a small motif
of feather,

Read >

Rewind

Have you ever seen something that buzzes inside you?
I am watching two kids encounter each other

Read >

Rationale

Because she still won’t sleep alone, you sleep deeply
with her small warm body wrapped in your arms.

Read >

Pupusas

no, the pupusa is a portrait
            of this life, crusting & breaking
                        with every lick & tooth

Read >

Psalm III

in what language should I speak to you, sun
so you’ll rise tomorrow for my child, so you’ll
rise and stimulate the growth of our food,

Read >

Night Song

You’ll never know
what became of me
in the dark, how
my body opened,

Read >

Handfuls

Summer is a pure lone mountain.
Somehow, a winter flowers against an enormous blue loneliness

Read >

Eurydice

It snowed the day I died, a freak spring storm.
(It was in the papers.)

Read >

December

Instead of snow, a dark pouring rain
to dodge as passersby reject us.  No spruces, but sycamores with their white cankers.

Read >

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Photo of Reyes Ramirez

Reyes Ramirez (he/him) is a Houstonian, writer, educator, curator, and organizer of Mexican and Salvadoran descent. He authored the short story collection The Book of Wanderers (2022), a 2023 Young Lions Fiction Award Finalist, and the poetry collection El Rey of Gold Teeth (2023), a finalist for the 2024 Texas Institute of Letters Award for Best First Book of Poetry. His latest curatorial project, The Houston Artist Speaks Through Grids, explores the use of grids in contemporary Houston art, literature, history, and politics. Reyes has been honored as a 2020 CantoMundo Fellow, 2021 Interchange Artist Grant Fellow, 2022 Crosstown Arts Writer in Residence, 2023 Intercultural Leadership Institute Fellow, 2023 Dobie Paisano Fellow, 2024 Speculative Play and Just Futurities Fellow and awarded grants from the Houston Arts Alliance, Poets & Writers, and The Warhol Foundation’s Idea Fund.

cover of El Rey of Gold Teeth

Spartanburg, South Carolina

"Reyes Ramirez writes poems that radiate wonder and surprise. El Rey of Gold Teeth takes us on a young man’s journey toward self—a mission to find his voice in a Texas household enriched and sometimes embattled by Mexican and Salvadoran culture and history. By mapping family memory and examining his encounters, struggles and triumphs in a chaotic American landscape, he also finds his place in the broken world and a purpose as the scribe, keeper of the stories."
— Rigoberto González

"In this dynamic collection, Reyes Ramirez uses poetry to travel through time and memory to reconstruct a family history across borders and languages, through the personal, the cultural, and the political. These poems are deft and fresh in their linguistic complexity, and the boundaries of the constructs of 'America,' 'home,' and 'lineage' are dissolved as this book reveals the truth of being 'other' in any place which seeks to erase us. It's a remarkable debut."
— Ashley M. Jones

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