Exhibition Notes: Portrait of Arapaima at the All-Night Diner
Oil upon oil. The arapaima is dressed for a night on the town: spangled slab of muscle, scales laced with neon. A fry cook is hollering Drown the kids! meaning two boiled eggs because all children can be made to order. The arapaima already carries eggs in its mouth, which is labyrinth-shaped, strung with possible selves like rivers of white thread. Alternative title: The future you pretended not to hear cracks against your teeth, a hailstone caged in glass. Last call now, when the dinosaurs take off their feathers and become bones. When the mammoths fold themselves into amber and fuel pumps. When the moon empties out like a packet of sugar and the arapaima is left alone with its own hard skin, hard tongue. Alternative title: When you are alone, you surface within your armor and find it has not protected but drowned you. Faces shove against the diner window. They want to take pictures with a body around their necks, draped so both ends point away from heaven. An article says the arapaima is invading Florida, meaning its corpse has been found there. The author emphasizes the ugliness of the species, its appetite. Alternative title: You become a queer elder by accident, not because you are good at living but because you are slow at dying. The arapaima orders the whole menu but finds it cannot swallow, its jaws too full of hallways, of corridors, of children’s names. Perhaps another word for armor is curse: to wander until you find the end of your own hungers. To be slow at dying. To be gripped by the world’s fist like a grease stain, blemish against blemish, oil upon oil.
Loren Maria Guay is a genderqueer Latine poet and speculative fiction writer. Their poems have been published in ANMLY, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Breakwater Review, West Trade Review, and elsewhere; they have been a finalist for the 2022 Peseroff Prize in Poetry, a Best of the Net nominee, and a 2024 Periplus Fellow. Born in Asunción, Paraguay and raised in Brooklyn, they currently spend their time between Chicago and Ann Arbor, where they are pursuing a PhD in English and Education at the University of Michigan.