birds near calexico-va
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Birds Near Calxico
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Agripina Vsquez Gonzlez
and Evon Comstock Morris
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Birds Near Calxico
They are pieces of,
smaller versions of
the white bed sheet,
propaganda leaflets
delivered by the sky.
They are the edges of the eye
that fly loose and land,
a flock of envelopes.
They peck at water
and beet seeds.
The field workers
are poked by the same sun
inserting itself inside
dried, flat, shirt pockets.
Making dizzied birds of
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Sunset in Coachella
All the palm trees stand in a line
while the sun picks the last pieces
of its broken glass from the world.
The tree trunks flash
with the day's final sparks, it's not easyto take back what you've done.
I watch their wounded trunks
writhe and sag. They are bruised
by the lash of the sunset.
Their haircuts are like the soul's necklace,
circular and strung. They face me
and the onset of night.
I was only eyes to see,
poor eyes, I would need to
dissuade them later.
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But now, they hang
on the palm trunk's glow
and in the leaves of its burning.
My eyes dry nicely in the hands
of the trees. They're not pouring me
the dreams of a prisoner.
A river walks into its own sandy wrinkles.And in that way, takes itself back, bit
by bit. It hushes inside itself. It re makes
itself
inside its curved memory.My eyes are in the trees again.
They dry a little more
each time they fly there.
The air reclines inside itself.
It takes each dot of mist to its mouth.
And the night sky it drapes me now
at the end of a day
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in a date palm orchard.
Light Flight
I'm a pair of legs under a skirt, rushing
like a head that nods
or like scissors to crop the overgrowth oflight.
Palm trees throw their shadows on the
street,
like dirtied work shirts, already implyingwe will succumb to the night.
It has begun to deprive us.
In the final stage bow it will be us and this,
the darkness gathering,
an encroaching network of holes,
the blackening foliage. Light drops into its
coal.
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Light drains. Light's gone.
I walk down the city street, into its
widening stainpast fast food restaurants, magazine stands
and everything accruing its dissolution.
I meet other eyes on the sidewalk.
They pair themselves against me, two by
two.I hold my breath to go inside their water.
The night that's a centrifuge.
It paints me with its dark oils.
It binds me with its iron petals.The moon that unravels at its edges,
the night clouds that eat from its frayed
collar.
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Lost Poems
Where will I find those poems
I left them blouse less
The naked little girls
They are hiding
They're ashamed
With so much to do to stay neutralTo strangle the day
Roll flat my pain
They've run off with
Somebody else's hands
They're goneThe run away girls
Whose feet
Took them away
Another of mine
A hungry bird ate
And there were others
I dropped in the street
They feathered the street
Like the skin of naked children
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And one melted here on the curb
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The Tanks
I see the tanks with their huge guns rolling.
They move along the freeway next to my
car.
They dress up the windows
while my kids fight it out in the backseat,and I try to drive the middle
like a bubble in the level.
They are in line and moving west from the
desert,through the canyon, cranking the horizon,
un spiraling the sky.
They count themselves to me as I drive
my kids to school. My kids call them tanks,
and smile at overgrown objects.
Then they go on fighting for a toy.
Then they go on to other things.
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A blue marble rests in its own circle
on the floor, acting like its not round.It forgets its personality,
its own ways of rolling.
And there are these camouflage nets
that are the only things flungindifferently around the necks of the tanks,
like lace scarves.
They are stuck in the tank lids.
They flap in the speed wind.
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Now You Are the Beginning
Now you are the beginning of everything.
Your face is a beginning.
Your mouth, eyes, cheek,
the beginning of mouth, eyes, cheek.
Your voice is the beginning of voice,
and your eyes the beginning of colors:
purple, orange, blue.
Your hands moving begin movement.
Your feet stepping begin the earth.
Your shining hair begins the light.
You begin the birds of my breast.
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Icehouse Party
I saw the fish that swim in your eyes
and all around us was the lush
of spring in San Antonio.
A dome of green and leaf and breath
harbored us in its wings. The fringes oftrees
rustled and flared with our speaking.
A filigree of soil loosened, lifted,
and freed itself,like a magic carpet delicately dreamed.
And the happy cries from the red and blue
of children's mouths stained with candy
colors,
caved deeply, sacredly inward.
"Aqu es donde we had our bailes,
y toda la noche, we danced."
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Your grandmother rolled out memories
across the mossy field where old tires,thrown from passing cars
scar the grass with ghost rings.
She lifted her finger, pointing as she spoke,
and embroidered five point estrellitas
in the eardrum of the sky.
In their own patois, the oaks squeak in
reply,
like floorboards underneath us, repeating,
we are, we are, we are what we speak.
She remembers vowel sounds to ease a
harvest
from the skirts of the pecan tree.
And how the fruit of oak, accordion, and
polka
marked the tones and ranges
left for human speech, always better
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to invest the night in dancing.
Let words take their place last in line,after music, after bodies moving. A night
spent well because there's nothing left to
say.
But now there's conversation.And these are her people, the characters
of family stories and icehouse rumors
a baby presses her tonsils to the sky in
screams,an old man shifts
inside his time and pain.
They take their place in all this shaping.
You are added with the others
to a beginning generation
that's run off at distance. I watch your
shadow
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shrink and spin and shake in the light
falling from a tin cone lamp.
We are held together in a seam of air,
the concave night pulling us within it.
I look across the scene to find your face.
I see those figures, moving shapes that
elbowthe surface of your eyes like fish.
Sometimes a mother
feels the child growing inside her as a fish.
It's then her body blooms an ocean within.
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Alone in Jurez
Looking for something to raise my blood
rate,
to infect me with its signal light virus.
Could it be some part of me
stuck to this desert thirty years ago,and when we left Jurez I got exported
while it stayed back alone like a
transplanted liver?
The desert's throat takes the oils from myskin.
I see the cars cross and clump in the streets.
I want the fuel fumes to dress me in their
silk.
Every few minutes someone comes
knocking,
for dish soap, for shoe polish,
for a little girl's plastic beads yelling,
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"Piri, Piri!"
My cousin's houseis the neighborhood store.
My cousin's dog went to sleep.
It stopped barking.
It slung the night into its bed sheets,
and there I was.
I was what was left over.
I still needed warming.
The dog curled itself inside itself.It made a small oven with its body.
I wanted a warmth like its warmth
so I wouldn't need
to feed myself to the fire.
I'd be doing better now
inside the dog's stomach.
I'd rest there.
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And, I wouldn't need to launch whole
worlds
from one wall of myself to another.To clear my mind
I stunned other parts of myself.
I am outside of the dog and alone,
alone in Ciudad Jurez.
In front of the house,
the wooden planks stand together.
They are like dog legs,
a better detail in the world than me,this woman,
a tangle of bone, joints and
skin the wind swept over.
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Persistent Persimmon
Delaying yourself
on the branches of a tree
that's lost its leaves
and shed spent blooms.
You are all color,and like the pomegranate,
autumn ornament,
sphere of fire.
Everything elseis brittle twig and unbent need.
My fallow heart
hangs with desire.
You are the subject, a point of reference,
a landmark of hue
growing sweeter, luscious orb,
and more weighty,
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lowering the arc of gravity
of the tree branch
that upholds youand us, in our hurry,
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Death Love
Don't ask me to die again yet.
I'm not done dying this death
that lured me like life but was love.
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Middle Pain or Gold Hoop Earrings
I didn't take off the gold hoop earrings
even though I see them hanging there
sometimes in window panes or in the
mirror and they don't look good.
They aren't a part of me. That's obvious,
intended. They're ornamentsand no one would disagree with that. They
have no place in staying there. They lead
other people in the wrong direction
about me. I do consider the gold mines,
sacred calendars and crowns turned to goldbrick by explorers.
Listen I didn't choose them. But no one
will know they were given to me.
A gift I just opened, as these things go.
I can defend my wearing them without
giving myself away, my intent,
my style, without saying anything about
what my taste is, what they cost or etc.
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by explaining that they're gifts and its true
but you wont see me hanging the gift box
on my sleeve They are hollows loops ofgold with a floral pattern embossed on
them. Clamping me because my hand
strayed there by its whim of wanting to use
itself. Then my hand recruited its partner,
both of them swarmed over to my right
side, to explore the tension between bothtips of the gold. And they pulled on it so it
displayed its claws that had been hidden all
this time
They wanted to undo them. Liberate the
fat right lobe.But the middle pain won't get me through
this. The earring has a sharp goodbye, and
getting past that I don't think I can right
now.
Even though I am reading a poet's collected
works, causing myself to worry so much I
won't understand it all . And look how it
spreads all over
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over a thousand pages. I won't get through
the two volume collection. My mind
doesn't hold enough water to sponge overthat much wood pulp.
Taking off my earring would be a
perfect task right now.
I might start to bleed and have to get up,
resolve the misunderstanding of
my wearing them at all with their giftmouth Go to the bathroom, squeeze myself
up into The mirrors mouth, and take the
strongest slice of light to My ear as close as
it can get, And really take a good long look
at the bleeding I could cause there, Whichcould lead next to my gauging my
complexion, putting a thumb to the spot
where I'm missing some eyelashes and they
never grow back, Then The hormone spots
that just started sprouting right on the crest
Of my cheekbones underneath my eyes,
Right there where the skin would throb me
so badly during my Childhood crying
spells, and my crying blisters would form
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there, saying go ahead and cry you can't cry
blood.
This would definitely work, And thebook would eventually get covered with
night air, Sitting there with its wings spread
open,
Cooling and cooling, and cooling most Just
before sunrise.
The book wouldn't oppose this either, Itwould sit so beautifully,
Luminescent and shadowing and taking the
light to its thighs As it started to come up,
How a book does, lighting up its raised
parts, Its plateaus and breasts.Its Either this or the middle pain like I
said earlier Only one thing: I need to
understand What the poet was up to, What
he was doing when no one was looking,
What he was doing with the sly hand,
While the dancing hand distracted us.
Either way, The middle pains sit at both
ends of this moment, The gold earring, The
collected poems of william carlos williams,
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They bookend me And my middle pain is
all I am ever since.
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One Year Old
he watched a crow
sew the thread of itself
to the sky,
black wing injection,
clapping eyelash,
carbon crux,
it lured him
limb and neuron
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to walking.
the black edge
of a wing
at the door of his throat,
he talked to the bird.
one year old
and so suited for life
see how he sings the seed of his life
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When I Was Twenty Three
in a bar on Hollywood Blvd,
you told me thats your favorite song,
the one mixed in with knives and forks
clinking together in plastic gray pans
of undone meals and cigarette ends.
And the way the bus boy grabs a dirty plate
makes the orange slice slide from position
like a nose
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puncturing the foam and
bubbles
hiding in the trash can.
The soapy water letting go the air that
burst from its sacs
My feet tapped under the table. The
food came and went.
My eyes or a nooseI thought thats
what you said next
or there was
a guitar strumming itself
over there.
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The Anticipated
The local mountains
burnished in our sight
re stage themselves in eventual side
glances,
and relapsed reflections,
They stayed still so long,
they let our eyes grow roots in them.
And less so, the mistaken appointment
time,
the wrong bus bench, a woman's green
card,
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the housekeeper's gaze she' thought she'd
cast away
Is it still there?
Two feelings
and we are strung across them
The toy and its allure
what it will never do once you own it,
and its unwrapped.
You hold it in your hands. But it holds you.
Never leaving you with
enough of yourself
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or enough of itself the doll that blinks
one eye
freely,
from the other
turns her head to you in the ad,
Winded by desire
and the motion and sway of it.
Or the greatest, most improbable likelihood,
If there is anything remaining
but the crash sight of desire,
but the huge uttering measure of its loss,
anything,
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The crash and music of that fall
like the burgeoning, blistering mouth of a
kiss un
given.
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Night Say
The train's cry that wrinkles the world,
composes it, says its say.
It's dragged scream carves the night.
It hangs its ache in places that can barely
take it.
The night speaks to me,
it poisons me with the taste of myself,
my pungent residue , a stream inside,
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the taut casing, the detonation,
the explosive launch of the night.
I raise myself to answer
like an un sunned flower
still left with a memory of rising.
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Poems and Rags
What are these rags we twist our hearts upon?Louise Bogan
Poems dont come to me now, not at all.
Not in a side ways glance do they
tap on me with their insect wings,
their purple lung and red slit mouth.
Only flies enter the living room
and my family instantly starts arguing over
who left the door open last again.
And there I go making my usual pitch
for looking at things straight on
which I can't seem to keep myself from
doing.
Mama's hands were always carrying
too much to close the door. They pulled
fresh heads of cotton from thorny cervixes
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and later, further north, they drew an aunt's
afterbirth
from my grandmother's thighs in a Ju
reztaxi.
They squeezed the bloody rags of a
drunken fight
in Durango. One starving farmer
drove a shovel into the eyebrow of another.
Since I was seven years old, I could see my
life
only making sense if I multiplied it many
times over.How else to absorb these things, the flies,
the
blood spills, the births kicked out of
hospitals.
Mama didn't take it as an insult, or some
dishonor,
to go between her mother's legs, bow
at her own beginning and quietly cup hands
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around a new sister, grip at the muscular
cord,
pull forth the placenta and say no to thedriver,
no, there was nothing going on in the
backseat.
The gut of my cry stood aside, watched me
come and go inside myself. I was born witheyes
worn out by useless tears, so I know I will
be ready
for all this brown hair that swings on my
backto become striped with white like my
mother's.
I'll offer other parts of my body for aging.
By the time it sets in completely,
I will feel I've asked for it,
that all along I've been adjusting
the speed of it myself.
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At seven I felt the old lady inside me.
She held up her hands and slowly counted,
raising a finger at a time, a finger for eachyear.
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Natural Death
Yo quiero salir del mundo
por la puerta natural.
Jos Mart
Lead me to exhaustion.Tire me more each day.
Debilitate me, finally.
Spend me, but completely.
Ration me to my end.
Deaden me profusely.
Administer my weakness
that I may cease with sighing.
Disintegrate ambition,
render me complacent.
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Culminate in zero
my resource of desire.
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Piata Pieces
The piata's already in pieces
turned into paint with the mornings
waters.
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Alone
My skin is peeled back.
Theres nothing to stop me
from seeing the water
sit still outside the window.
I pull my fingers through my hair.
A strand comes off in my hand.
Someone will find it later tangled in a
broom,
so that strand by strand
I know I come undone in a day.
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I want to water my branches.
Roots grow down dont they?
Down there they see
that you leave me alone.
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Smuggler's Song
He took us to a restaurant
next to a lake in Oaxaca.
We got out of the taxi.
already hungry.
Lets go see the swans first," he said.He didnt care too much for eating.
I watched the floated, misnamed birds.
It was Roberto, me, and my sister.
He was crazy about her.
The ducks looked sluggish.
He called them swans.
He was so struck by their buoyancy
and the waters reciprocating swells
that he sang Ovid to a black duck.
This one I will name The Black Sea.
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My sister looked a little bothered.
The corner of her mouth grated.
He spun his torso, flapped an arm.
He noticed the pressure
had changed in her face.
He put his hands
like a vice around his head.We all saw it then walked
over to the restaurant.
There were meats, organs of kill
and homemade sausageshanging from the ceiling
like hands reaching down at us.
He hired a trio for serenatas
and threw his money around
like it bothered him the way it was sitting in
his pockets.
He dedicated "Camelia" to my sister.
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He was a smuggler so it all made sense.
Then he changed her name to "Camelia,"
as if we all needed a disguise.He read a Benedetti poem
about building a bridge between two
countries.
His father was from England.
and wished to stun that side of himselfthat lived unwillingly in Mxico,
and refused to speak Spanish.
Roberto, his half blood son, was now drunk
And crying through more Benedetti poemswhich we had trouble hearing through loud
music.
The sky covered over the stars.
We got into a taxi which he filled with his
pungent breath.
It rained which inspired him.
He began to recite Macbeth.
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And he begged that we no longer say his
name.
We arrived at the Zcalo.
The driver gave him a business card.
It flew from his reach like a wild bird
and landed in the gutter
where the errant waters of the street
blurred the ink and washed
away the letters, while the rain
hummed the city to sleep.
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Barcelona Beach
We scraped across the beach.
We dug wrinkles in the sand.
I walked alone with my children.
I plowed the childrens stroller.
The wheels were paralyzed and wouldn't
roll.
They carved two parallel ridges that
followed
behind us like large letters spelling out
our strangeness. The sun lit a gray
discharge
of air hanging above us when we looked
up,
streaming below when we looked down,
a parade of tarry molecules, the sky
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pressed itself inside the tails of our path.
Smog swam inside the ridgesand was everywhere at once.
I cant stop thinking of the black satin shoes
stitched with pink flowers and green
tendrils
in a shop window. They sat together
behind the glass panes a few hours ago.
Now theyre here, hands on
their hips, to stand in for my desire.
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Sin el Amor
Looking for a job
I walked up and down
Los Angeles streets.
I wrote my address and phone number
on papers and gave them away.
At one restaurant, a man put
an asterisk next to my name.
It came to that.
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Jupiter Street
They are looking for you with a hunger.
They part the hair of time with fingers now
numbed by the search.
They want to place themselves there,
with you, again,
in the barrio called Satlite.
The cup of their souls at your hip tapped
your furrows.
The brick is what made you, the brick and
the slap, the brick and the slap.
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It creased you dark brown
and bent your back
so that you were always
tipping forward, toward those children,
your harvest of arms.
You served them sugar cane, slammed the
reeds with the machete
you carried from your withered rancho
when you became a bricklayer in Jurez,
the city of songs.
A river a current of flotsam,
cyanide fish, and metal frogs.
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Human kidneys that filter refinery smoke.
A pack of wild dogs passed.
Sunlight succumbed to the river.
The neighborhood idled.
Inside metal cans, fire was stirred byconversation.
You swung the machete.
It still held a hand shaped portion of air.
But the rancho swims the caverns and
shores of the mind.
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The shovels bite and all its avalanche uponus.
Of your eight daughters and six sons,
some work in the T.V. factories, crossthe border to work as maids, as bricklayers.
Those who went to Tejas, Nuevo Mxico,
California
come back displaying their children
like a handful of marbles rolling over a
table
They crossed the desert to see you.
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They crowded at the wood stove.
"Mis hijos," you cry.
You begged them to eat, to dance.
They are looking for you, now, with a
hunger, abuelo.
They find your ghost, in a memory of the
river,
and they build you of brick and of sugarcane.
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Tattooed Shoulder
This is the story of a language
whose plot fear turns,
whose English unfolds
in chain link hieroglyphs.
A tattooed shoulder
flickers in the alley.
The lamb of debased Joinery, of treaties
that name an everything, an all.
Life lives in this span of the parasol.
Factions gather.
Disparate squadrons convene.
Grammars and entrails
go offered politely.
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Commerce and trade inscribe
the sonnets of neon seed, genetic maize.
Syllables slouch.
One couples with others.
Arteries indifferent to the central
muscle, heart of the earth,
deliver the fracaso.
Farmers fly,
their shovels laden.
These aerial fistfuls of earth
arch dizzily.
A flash alluding to freedom,
the tattooed shoulder,in gothic font,
emerging from the brush
of the 4th Street alley.
A bird, inspired, unhinges itself.
The carceral sky grasps at the tones
of its winged start. A Zapatista
commander lifts her huipil
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to feed the mouth at her stream of milk.
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A Stolen Boy
I am passing through a gallery of billboards.
Weeds in their strewn application on the
earth
may wave in a breeze,
but I dont see them, or the rocks that store
sun energy
in their thumb sized selves, old forms.
Bugs turn their terse skin to the shine,
cover their eyes too,
like us when our pupils cower and
rescind.
The billboards are reading themselves to
me.
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Egyptian pyramids, tanning machines, gold
watches,
massage and jacuzzi.
Fifty minutes more on the freeway and we
arrive at sea level, the Salton Sea.
Its been a year since the young boy, small
life,
was taken. He passed this way, through
this desert.
Not seeing shrubs or desert herbs, not
creosote,
not chapparal, but billboards in their
urgency,
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large letters, their women in bikinis,
liquors,
hotels, and golf clubs.
It was the death birds first who found him.
Vultures flew around the corpse
of the ten year old undone by a plan and a
chase.
A boy was stolen.
And time wouldnt stop.
Now he smiles from a billboard that says
Help Us Find His Killer.
Next to his schoolboy picture, is the police
sketch
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of a man who took this boy in his stretched
arms,
and left a bound skeleton.
The desert shakes along old earthquake
lines.
Its rivers drain. They crawl off into
invisible, unfound branches of water.
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Lollipop
Walking through the candy aisle
at the corner market.
I saw the spiral lollipop,
its bold intestines flat
open and smiling.
Candied, sweet powders, pills, and
liquids
line the rows of the candy shelves,
and nearby the breads, cans of olives,
imported cheese.
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Where did my mother go?
I feel her face move in close to me,
her dark face rose from my face,
her cheeks feel like they lay on my cheek
now,
I imagine her face inlaid in my face,
What holds her face together
pulls on me now, her bones hold up my
face.
It is there I feel her closest
on the skin under my eyes.
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With its fame and finishing feathers
It is Friday, isn't it? And, ay, the start ofme
isn't rushed into its holding place, isn't
backed up and stalled there,
as if at the dead end street that was the
natural, northern barrier of my old, old
neighborhood. Pine trees and batwings, bruised legs, dull ball games,
and that's what little girls are made of.
Some half of me isn't lulled, isn't
inactive,reared up inside its own elements,
ascertaining its origins,
nor getting its high fives in its retreat,
squatting in the pen.
Flagrantly it carries on, like a wine red
mouth
dragging itself beyond the fence posts of
beginnings, middles and endings
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I would trade this arbitrary Friday for
another Fridayesque assortmentof time,
so long as it was authoritative, able to
hold a name card on itself
a definite breach of the contract of life as
otherwise,
as other than Friday with its the mill oftime, of work,
of static avalanche.
Even the restaurants and businesses
acknowledgeit as something apart, something
canonized in cliches,
thank god it's Friday
but this hum drum Friday does not
shows signs
that it senses how anti climactic it is,
how incestuous
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it persists, nose to the sniff, tracking its
indefinite path.
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Naming
When we named our sons,
we knew they would need names
that could be changed, altered, added to or
subtracted from.
We knew they would grow to name
themselves,
or that they would grow to shape new
names.
Each sound of the name holds
a tempo, a fabric,
And those were places not yet revealed in
the stretch of their life.
Places they would store
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the less intended things we would give
them,
Maybe those things we couldn't subdue,ignore,
transform, shake free from our own names
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Granadas
In the backyard there were granadas,
twin pomegranate trees.
The same sour seeds, twice,
knuckled inside pale skin,
and scarlet rind.
East tree and west tree.South was the freeway,
its veins of pushing sounds.
North was my seventh birthday.
Under the long dress mama made me,my skin drank the darkness.
I felt the sweep of the skirt,
dark, grace, play of my knees.
My cousins, Linda, Danny,
and the youngest
exhaled by the freeway,
came to my party.
When the singing stopped,
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our eyes turned to the candle flame,
its orange hat burning.
Mamas black hair curledand bumped against her back.
There was each bone of her spine,
and her chest rising.
I didnt need anything
but her eyes to hold melike a seed in their hands.
She replaced her eyes
with the cameras eye and a wish
heard its name get whispered.
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In the Living Room with Isaac
in my sister's house,
every corner a design
ordered from catalogues
or bought from windows,
we were safe there.
Then he enters and we move
toward his blood, forgetting
him, though it was his cut,
his chance to be m.c.,we looked past the angle of his
eyebrow, his eyes cast downward,
though it was his wound,
his bloody face,
we didn't care that he talk,
we swung our minds,
we cast our panic,
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and his, his sore
a thing which bleedswas making its disappearance
over and over.
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Old Tree Man
He carried a thick document
into the restaurant where I worked,
always with a loop of musk
around him, and hair dripping down to his
waist,
and talk in his air. San Jose, Costa Rica.
Not driving his eyes at my breasts,
or tipping his head to catch a view
of my legs in that apron I wore.
The world meeting in Brazil
and the holes in the sky,
and without a coin to pay
he sat to his meals,
and there was a part of my mind
saying he's a con. But now
as I remember him, should I ask
that he be living?
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though he lie under something horrible
that fingers him,that does him violence,
that makes him older yet, more tree like
And more poor, and is there any luck
anymore in his conversations,
to take a meal not paid for.and the mottled gray ropes of his hair.
The old man walked,
and walking, lodged the world
into his eyes, like two ozoneapertures, two burning goggles.
I remember him now
more tree than man
this man who walked like a tree
and dies like a tree.
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Micro Economics
On my way back to the store
to buy a second set of car safety devices
with black harnesses for the kids.
I dismissed the thought just minutes ago
in the cash register line. Now I am backthere again,
but on the opposite side of the grain.
My foot affirms the gas pedal.
My memories slip inside new costumes.They assort themselves thematically as
beehive chambers.
Here are the kernels of pollen, there the
propolis and wax,
and crystalline honey,
the royal jelly, the startling sex organs.
A stop sign jostles me,
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shuffles the wires of my electronics board
inside.
Advancing through the bulk of air
and visual street melange
the windshield panorama in reverse.
I collect the souvenir of my indecision.
Dust particles of worrylike magnetic flowers
bloom under observation windows.
Dreamers cross the street with solid
pockets.For me its the proceeding herd of brake
lights
and the bar code I'm pursuing life in front
of.
I sort receipts with my mania. I seek tax cuts
with it.
The math of my life sits on square pieces of
paper,
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spreads me evenly over the past fiscal year.
The kids swing their limbs like spider legsunder the pluck of their safety belts. Their
elbows,
ribs, and shoulder blades grow among
greenhouse gases.
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Curse
Im your curse, I know,
a woman who drags from your life
and yellows your songs.
Bandages wrapped our eyes, concealed usto ourselves.
We live in reverse.
My heroes and role models cancel yours
and vice versa.
Theres the blue bathtub in a picture of
the baby.
He holds his smile.
Hes wrapped in white.
I'm obsessed with the blue tile of the
bathroom floor,
in the picture, behind the baby
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since its color is thoroughly bound to its
substance.
The babys cheeks are apples.
They are Valentines.
All this is the running subtext of our
contact.
These words come to me on their own.
I risk myself in saying them.
They yellow the page with their certain tint
and inlay their genetic code into thispaper.
A slow sliding worm chews its path over
the bridge between your island and mine.
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Innocencia
To see the poems as innocent.without ideas, without things
The Absolutely How To's planted, limb
less, claw less in my ribs.
A swan of breath bridles me with my own
belt loops.
I interrupt the
Saturday I've overslept, I wake up with
sleep bruises hard to sift from ordinary
tweaks and pulls, gasoline nozzles, thekitchen sink drain
my life reduced to several certainties.
Yet my body, my mind,
even the poetry may be able to
to retain its innocence?
I'd like to drive my car
so it move the inches of me
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over the inches of a street.
I am out ofspeed, don't have a staff of people to handle
my
dreams for me.
I'd give them work for a day
or two, then they may go jobless, or find ajob
somewhere more lucrative
in a factory of dreams.
But while they worked for me I'd askone charge to stand in my kitchen,
reading my poems to me,
in their voice,
so I could
make necessary changes
or find another poem inside each one
poem birthing poem..
Another reminds me, when I wince,
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or my thoughts of how not having
them now,
I may take a bus tour of Mexican sierras,wake up mornings with a cup of hot
chocolate,
walk through plazas,
buy flowers from children.
But it is not the children who obstruct me,that comes from within my ribs,
my mind, myself,
I guess my heart's in it too.
Because they deliver poetic lines all thetime:
"Mommy,
not everything is named!"
and "how big is the straight in the circle?"
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She's a Small Town
Shes a small townShes a small town wherever she goes
of two main streets that lay
in the four directions
Her name and an arrow are printed
on a shiny metal signposted on the side of the freeway
Shes the small town with children
who hang to her
The small town where many peopleknow each other
and talk about each other
and one girls shame is the center of
attention
Shes a small town where
your hair style is first
and you dont talk loudly
and there are teachers
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who copulate with their students
though that probably happens
everywhere
A small town where the police chased
and then shot and killed a teenage boy
near the school after cornering him and
sending
a dog after him
Shes a small town where a queen is
chosen every year
who rides down the main street
sitting on a car and wearing a longdress
Shes a small town and the city official
reached down into the pants of a little
girl
Shes a small town of stray dogs and
owls at night
where strong winds brush
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through the streets and uproot old trees
or make whirlwinds of dust arise fromempty fields and loosen tumbleweeds
that roll and fly freely
Driving up the winding road
that leads to the nearest mountain peak
along the way there is an oak treewhere kids gather to drink beers
There are some who ignore the stars
and those who give themselves to a
dying star
Shes a small town
Shes a small town where some people
have lived all their lives
and some come from other places
but they all drive down the main
streets
Theres a plaque at the park dedicated
to a committee
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and names are engraved there
the stone fountain is dry
and in the white church on the corner
the preacher is inviting people
to rise and come forward
be born again
a womans body was discardedin the mountains
Police dogs didnt find her attackers
Shes a small town where the store
owneris turning the lights off
closing up for the night
and there are a lot of people
lining up at the casino
The sun sets on a blanket
of brown and yellow mountains
a curse of colors, of pink, orange,
scarlet.
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Shes a small town
a small town where the peopleturn away from her face
though they belong to her
Shes a small town
where the people scatter and hide
when they see her face and browor hear her names or see her thin hands
Shes a small town
Shes a small town wherever she goes
of two main streetsthat lay in the four directions
Her name and an arrow are printed
on a shiny metal sign
posted on the side of the freeway
Shes a small town that spins them
around
that keeps the shining horses corralled
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and the only way out is the path of
her screaming
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Arms to Untie Me
Your fingers finish at my skin,
and drive their plexus to my ores.
They are tubes of silk that siphon my desire.
Sounds die when I hear you.
Because you speak,
bits of sand are spit out and they pile
themselves up
like anthills
in the useless desert all around you.
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Deep Skin
In my deep skin,
there are ships that drive horizons
through me.
The tips of their sails
pierce my bodyand are the million sharp edges
of my arms and legs,
colliding into surface form.
Oh, let me find a stringand a hook
to capture someone
at my shore.
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