Read “Masked” by Carlos Andrés Gómez, published in Shō No. 8 (Winter 2025/26), accompanied by an audio recording by the author.
Masked
I come from men who undulate
into stillness, steady like liquor
beneath the lip of a glass
(silhouettes fluttering
the backdrop like scattered
magpies), expressions unmoved
as though carved from marble.
We get ours. Command a room
with grace and gravitas, break
a silence with a voice two
octaves lower than what
naturally sings. We birthed
the version of ourselves we let
the world see. And, by that,
I mean we were offered a mold
we poured ourselves into. Reject
the status quo and then uphold
it. I hold my daughter with a grip
calloused by weighted steel
as she wails against her bedtime.
Tenderness was everywhere
from the men I love, so were
the broken edges. A warning
in a voice, look. A belt snapped
& then laid out across a bedsheet.
When I was younger, I was more
helium than water without
the impossible weight of lineage.
It was as though I appeared,
rootless and unbound, but
I emulate my father’s hurried
gait without trying. Each step
retracing an inertia pervasive
as affection interwoven with
melancholy. Is it what inspired
tío to invite the guerillas into
abuela’s dining room? The story
goes he opened every bottle
he’d been saving, aguardiente
and rioja, they rested their
Kalashnikovs against the cool
concrete wall, ate a paella
the circumference of ten men
and then slept so deep he thought
they might never wake. But at dawn,
they rose, handed him a bag weighted
with money to carry out in his lime-
green suitcase, before abandoning
the only paradise he’d ever known.
Which is to say, I aspire for a last
meal more rich than imagination
and a stiff glass as my world comes
apart, to find the sweetness at
the edge of a blade, sit across
from a man ready to kill my family
and share a story that gives us both
permission to weep.
About this poem: Until poetry gave me permission toward an expansive embrace of paradox that allowed me to fully encounter the wide, contradictory, messy, and nuanced dimensions of human experience, it felt near impossible to begin to make sense of the men I have so loved who embody the extremes of how manhood postures and evades.
This poem reckons with how I’ve tried to make sense of those examples and lessons, in lineage with the mythologies, both familial and cultural, that shape my understanding of myself.
Carlos Andrés Gómez is a Colombian American poet from New York City. His poetry collection Fractures (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020) was selected by Pulitzer Prize winner and 19th U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the Felix Pollak Prize. Winner of the Foreword INDIES Gold Medal and the International Book Award for Poetry, Gómez has been published in The Nation, New England Review, The Sunday Times, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, The Yale Review, Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World (W.W. Norton & Co., 2022), and elsewhere. Carlos is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He can be found @CarlosAGLive or CarlosLive.com.
Photo Credit: Friends & Lovers Photography
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