Angel Dominguez is a Latine poet and artist of Yucatec Maya descent, born in Hollywood and raised in Van Nuys, CA by their immigrant family. They’re the author of Desgraciado (Nightboat, 2022) and other works. They were the 2022 University of Arizona Poetry Center Summer Poet in Residence. You can find Angel’s words online and in print in various publications including BOMB Magazine, The Berkeley Poetry Review, FENCE, Prolit Magazine, SFMOMA Open Space, and elsewhere. A Tenth Anniversary Edition of their debut book, Black Lavender Milk and a new manuscript of poems are forthcoming.
Heaven sent–
I’ve been wrestling heaven 4 as long as I can remember
heaven held me in a headlock, hoping I’d black out
long enough to riptide all that ails, a volant wound
molting through the seasons, relearning living,
allowing the latency to eat me entirely; I’m tired
pretending I could believe in heaven, you’ll find
no wool over vigilant eyes; mother tongue missing.
Heaven sent her very best colonizers, every aryan
descendent of empire; her most treacherous class
-traitors, narcs, and counter insurgents; her best
puppets of death and cowardice; her favorite
plagues of capitalism and country and state–Hell,
heaven sent AI generated messages and images
of ancestral beloveds defiled by her colonial lens
all their messages corrupted by white imagination.
I don’t believe in any “kingdom” of heaven nor earth.
I only believe liberation; in truth there is one nation:
The Nation on no map.
The Nation heaven couldn’t kill.
The Nation that builds a strangler ficus future.
The Nation that is all of us against the last of them.
