2 Poems by Rigel Ruel Portales

Treating an In-Grown Toenail

The process should be easy.

1.     Stub your toe

2.     After three days, investigate the itch and push

until pus is visible

3.     Drown it in the chill of your basin

4.     Wait for a tragedy to ask for help

5.     For the succeeding year:

a.     Wear your socks halfway

b.     Don’t wear your new shoes (They aren’t for the wounded)

c.     Continue commuting and stifle screams when:

i.     You bump the narrow platforms

                            ii.     A perfumed office worker steps on it

                            iii.     You step like the wound shouldn’t exist

                            iv.     The bus hits a pothole

d.     Pray for open seats

e.     Hide it as necessary (for good grades)

f.      Wash your socks when you get home

6.     When there are no more classes:

a.      Tell your parents (with Parisian nonchalance)

b.     Go to a nail stylist with their money:

    i.     Tell her it’s been a few months
And it’s a 3 from 1-10

     ii.     Let her cut the nail and pull the roots

c.     Apply a ¾ empty bottle of betadine as needed:

      i.     Only ever a drop (anymore will stain the floor)

d.     Gently wipe with cotton (anymore will waste your little-haves)

e.     Wait

f.      Wait

g.     When the wound is dried:

        i.     Imagine a god of healing (your religion is without)

        ii.     Continue closing your eyes after
Amen

        iii.     Pick at the scab

h.     Forget (don’t smell the pain gripping your nails)

7.     Wear your favorite

Shoes and smile while

Practicing dancing from steps

1-6.

Bleed if you must (it’s from the smallest spot).

Still Life of Raw Meat

How easy undulation arrives

and makes my body a home:

a cloud lofting through

a kitchen window, the faucet

watering my hands—Splash!

Behold light scattered

in my plump hands as they wash

plumper, slaughtered meat.

This becomes a light meal

if one knows a butcher in themselves

who reflects with a whetted cleaver,

who handles the pulpit point of a knife

like their father who pronounced

their son and prolonged himself

in their cuts, who is a blade himself.

Quietly, my lola once remarked

my anger at her words in my kitchen.

Loudly, I chewed the skin of some dead

animal, deep fried and massacred en masse.

In another meal, I might have stewed it

into softness for her. I know. There is a fashioning

which is my anxious blade and which is my brittle fate.

My breaking. And my skin, the unconcerned roofing

of my plush home, holding it all together.

Rigel Portales has been writing poetry and creative nonfiction for over five years. He bases his works on his Twitter account at @rijwrites and on Wattpad where his past titles are regularly read by hundreds. His biggest inspirations for writing are Danez Smith, Charles Bukowski, Ava Guihama, and his grandmother. He's currently planning to take up Political Science after he graduates.