From “The Age of Aquarius”

From “The Age of Aquarius”

By Roy G. Guzmán

 

Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in. I have learned to repeat these words to myself whenever I feel stuck.

 

Fear rustles mantras out of my body. I have risked a motherland. Why not also seduce the foreigner who implores nativity if loneliness can be broken and shared? 

 

                                                         

 

When Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical debuts on Broadway in April of 1968, it becomes the first production to include a nude scene with its entire cast. 

 

Around the same time, Star Trek has popularized the phrase, Where no man has gone before. 

Our bodies contain elements of outer space. So that when we’re naked we are gazing at the universe. 

 

                                                         

 

The night of my second panic attack, after getting released from the hospital and determined to change my mental health’s course, I dream of a nebula in the shape of an octopus, holding an astronaut in each tentacle. From my perspective, the cosmonauts feed on all my arms.

 

                                                         

 

No more falsehoods or derisions. Golden living dreams of visions. Mystic crystal revelation and the mind's true liberation.

 

                                                         

 

In the Age of Aquarius, give or take, plurality overtakes singularity. History becomes bored by its self-referentialism. Triangles burrow into single lines. Equal signs collapse on the spikes of other equal signs. 

 

In the Age of Aquarius, give or take, we give birth to information and information delivers us. I make a fist and my fist speaks in four languages. Letters enter me and suddenly I experience flavors few before me have. 

 

In the Age of Aquarius, give or take, gender is a tree is a building is a cloud. It is anything that hasn’t been said. The truest instinct one listens to more and more.

 

 

About this Poem

 

“Literature on mental illness, written by queer and trans BIPOC authors, is hard to come about. Adding to that unique legacy, this excerpt is part of a longer piece about mental health, queer love, pop culture, and decolonial worldmaking. I am interested in the various connections between the individual and what we gather under the umbrella term ‘collective.’ As you read this excerpt, play The 5th Dimension’s version of the medley ‘Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In’ and imagine what a better tomorrow might look like.”—Roy G. Guzmán

 

 

About the Poet

 

Roy G. Guzmán was born in Honduras and raised in Miami, Florida. They received an MFA from the University of Minnesota.

 

Guzmán is the author of the full-length collection Catrachos (Graywolf Press, 2020) and the chapbook Restored Mural for Orlando (Queerodactyl Press, 2016). The recipient of a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship and a 2016 Scribe for Human Rights Fellowship, among other awards, Guzmán is currently pursuing a PhD in comparative studies in discourse and society at the University of Minnesota. They live in Minneapolis.