Isaac Salazar

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Image by Marcus Vinícius A. Ribeiro from Pexels

Isaac Salazar is an Austin-born and Houston-based poet. A winner of the 2025 Michelle Boisseau Poetry Prize, his poems have been published or forthcoming in AGNI, Asterales, Bear Review, Hayden's Ferry, Honey Literary, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. He is a graduate student at Rice University.

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Raw 

Despite preventative anticipation against disease,

I still yearn to be breached by the body unornamented. 

Multiple bodies. The body of the undisclosed. The down 

low. The antibody, treading blood’s pain, shaped like the Y 

in Yes. Please, another body I want inside of my body. There is 

my phone, that floating magic 8 ball, manifesting for more 

body. I narrate before hookups that I don’t open up easily, my body 

uncompromised with the mind like an olden dualism, though

I want to feel, again, as a glove hibernates the hand. A face mask

a halo to the face and, therefore, living its maps. There is no ethic 

in repulsing complements. Like a pair of homophones, there is

so much music in being with someone. In someone being inside 

of you. Last night, the rain sang deep into its empty bucket. I lay 

on a towel for a man like a pumpkin, waiting to be carved and turned

-spook: That candlelight to enter the center of me like a spirit possessing, 

then realizing. A pillow settles under my stomach as if I am a mother keeping 

warm the child-animal I give birth to, not out of survival but, rather, lovingly, 

through love. That maternal love. The pendulum of biology that swings 

toward want, and the want to fossilize that want into forever material. What 

I’m saying is that I only want to be close to a body if almost-consuming. As if 

filling me more whole like a bin of milk in the fridge which holds nothing else but this. 

          Listen: