it wasn’t really a dog, but a man
back for revenge & unable to lure
his adversary out of his home—say
it wasn’t really a road, but a dream
our imaginations paved. That’s why
our slingshots veered left & we missed
him every time. Explain the day
we ducked supper for the .22 rifle,
became hosts to the noiseless rabbits,
how they arrived like thoughts into
the grass we guarded, & came away
with the bells of three bodies gripped
in our hands, headed to the pines
for a stew on branch-fire, the peppers
Abuelita grew in a wheelbarrow
the secret ingredient. A few spoons
made us mummies trying to talk
our bodies out of going blind,
back & forth wiping our brows
in an ecstatic hell of found time.
Explain, but it won’t be enough
for the dice-roll that told us which
rooster to dub with a razor blade,
how it took only a day to train it
to blaze its feathers at turkeys,
even the ones that attacked
Tía when she wore skirts.
So many days are tunnels. At the end
of one, nets of sunlit water for bathing
outside. Another leads to a flea market
where all our money put together
affords only one pair of boxing gloves,
so we flip a bottle cap to decide who
gets to fight with his right hand.
The Dead Women
The killers went to no trouble covering
the bodies, no black plastic bags, no lids
on barrels, knowing vultures would bury
them in a lone cloud. Every day, women
rouse out of sleep, sit up thousands
in the blue-black light to catch
hour-long buses in lots their bodies
know by memory. By early morning
plants hum with the gloved hands
of women assembling screens all kinds
& sizes, LED, LCD, plasma, touch
for smartphones & tablets. Shantytowns
leap into the desert to meet the demand.
At the end of a long week golden arms
dangle out of sport utility vehicles, men
catcall in elaborate necklaces, step out
& tap snakeskin boots to music no one
will tell them is too loud. Women with
their own money might smile, or refuse
in the wrong manner. It’s absurd to say
these were not murders of passion, but
the media says the impossible. Imagine
no bars over windows & doors, these
neighborhoods with no layers of graffiti
competing incessantly to stay king. A body
appears along a highway, no one discusses it.
Then a chicken farmer finds seventeen.
It takes a number to shock people now.
You might think a match cannot be struck
on such a suffered surface, no one shouts,
no one snaps, no one has had enough.
Then a mother’s heart & mind go blank,
screaming, attacking, accusing everyone in front
of the station, the whole world, of murdering
her youngest, a dancer who had no silicone
implants coroners could use to identify her.
Aluminum children run holding snakeskins up
to every car that passes, shaking them like sleeves
of shirts drivers keep leaving behind.
Out of improvised holes, shanties cooked up
with sticks & soda cans, out of roofs that invent
rags of shade on the ground,
they emerge ecstatic to announce their market:
coyote pup, vulture fledgling, scorpions
clicking in chicken-wire cages raised like lanterns,
like a futile conjure they must attempt
hundreds of times. Hard to know—belt or boot
maker, medicine man—who ever stops to reward
their cunning. On this road only a kettle of vultures
stirs the bored stadium of survival.
But the truth, once in a while, a black
Bronco pulls over, with a rack of ibex
horns as its hood ornament, with dice
that dance from its rearview mirror above
a dash plated with gold, & the eagerness
of those children surrounds the opened door.
They must have a name for the exotic boot
that gravels the ground, maybe God is a man
recover their faces in his mirrored sunglasses.
When the firing squad lines up, honey
is what I hear, jars of it glowing
in the sun, the buzzed lasso
of bees hovering above the lids,
a busker’s accordion …
the vagabond who taught me staring
was impolite takes out his teeth
& smiles. Shipwrecks
of rice, hanging scales weigh clouds
of mulato pepper, a bag of pig’s feet—
every sale shakes the dials
from sleep … & past a parade of face masks,
the backdoor of the pink corner store
brightens to the scuffed yard where
I set down my first rooster & watch it blaze
its head feathers toward a house of cards.
If I was born into vengeance, dragged
into life to carry death across a battlefield
that doesn’t exist. If I was born
into these alleys butchers & vendors use—
drain on the floor, hoses nearby
humming with sandblasts of water—
then the man with a desert scorpion ambered
in his belt buckle has been in charge
this whole time. When I hear another accordion
join the busker, & the men raise up & point,
the scorpion is the one who comes over
to my ear & grins No,
that’s the sound of Santísima Muerte pulling
her drenched hair out of a bucket.
Mercury Topaz
Trapped in trying, caught in the cloth
of my own dreaming, unable to wish myself
free—somersault snatched in a pelican’s gullet,
suffering to wake from a mumbled country
the size of my sleep, with barely enough room
for wanting out. How to know—as the flicker
of a faceless start, unborn, uncoined, desperate
to stay dead (or was it alive?)—why
I was being smuggled in a box surrounded
by the jive of tricksters—whose footsteps
came so crisply after coming to a standstill
the size of an ocean. How to predict
a trunk would fly open, that I would be a man
weeping blindly on a bleached floor
of light, unable to decide if condemned or spared
under the belly of a bridge, as models
of other vehicles sped by. How to ever
bring myself back—to the size of knowing,
who drove, which voices were real.
A few footprints & a coffee left steaming
on the dash of the unlocked car.
Laundry across Balconies or, Deciding to Fold
The jellyfish tethered midair this morning,
floating in the noised vaults between buildings,
sent out sleeping across balconies, were proof
this day arrived under a table of water
to show us its cards. With a high inhuman
kindness, in the wired space where clothes
mean to dry, a voice began but only its solitude
could be made out. Above the snare of sparked
gardens, stray cats sipping a birdbath, a ceremony
of drowned kites hovered, trying to age backward
to the invention of flight. My mind made up
by the birds that flickered away from the wire
while those shirts reeled in the clockwork
of the voice’s hands—the first few squeezed
decide that nothing is ready to come in.
Topito’s Yes
The window cracks open, an ant travels
the sunny side of an egg, & already
the song at my heels is a trumpet
snickering at death, a Yes
played simply, resembling a blind
man’s cane, or light tapping into
the belly of a knife, flash
that agrees with the countdown
of clicks that crown the bottom
of the black, triggering stove-heat
to rise with the tightly knit noise
of mobs in the street. Demands
for me to give up raising that song
as my child, getting louder;
to declare every minute spent
convincing that flash to be a flame
we could carry, that in turn
would carry us, for at least
a few moments past
the border, into an afterlife of baked
parking lots & payphones, beyond the wall
of God, as a failure.
After hours that could have held water
& didn’t, after moments that flickered
like moths but never frenzied the light.
After a day of pouring myself tea
from Death’s immaculate silver kettle,
with everyone standing carefully back—
I walked out, the Yes
from that morning blazed in my
palm. Held like the last match
in the book, handled like a fledgling
fallen from the branches
of the zeitgeist. Passing
eyes that stopped everything
to accuse me of petty arson, senseless
blasphemy, felony sex. Passing
the supremely unchosen, stares
that stood unlit in doorways,
the incremental wives, with only a few
others that kicked ant piles to join me.
It led us to an altar with a Dance of Death
scene in miniature: tide of skeletons
on emaciated horses galloping toward
small astonished figures of man.
By the time it took us to the altar with
the Virgin Mary seated next to Santa Muerte—
arranged as if not caring who sees them
at the same table—we were fifteen
with one flame between us. But down
to just me again at the improvised dock
where that Yes was payment, & the sound
of aluminum shadows, empty cans
twisting, signaled the ferryboat coming.
Part II
Sixty-eight were found without heads,
feet, or hands, making the road a land
of taillights, flames for miles blown out
after those of us driving, fed up, abandoned
our minds for the Ferris wheel horizon
above lots & tents. Consuelo woke up
that day to billboards, advertised promises
to dump rival cartels & their families
where their bodies would best decorate
the ground. Sumidero’s plaza brimmed
with hissed thoughts & gossip, bitterness
of why & who to blame, flooding
the monument whose folded arms became
pathetically symbolic of the State.
And just as demands to topple the statue
came to a boil, the morgue-bound
procession of those bodies made everyone
step aside & pause. This is how Consuelo
& I met. Of all the drivers who gave up
getting to the other side of their lives
that night, I was the only one dancing
after satisfying a terrible need
to vandalize something in an unfinished
church with a few cans of paint God
must have left sealed for me. Consuelo
the impossible stranger, who took my arm,
told me have respect, but underneath
wanted to know how I could be
celebrating despite those bodies in black
plastic bags making their way thru.
One moment, the vehicle
set on fire at the intersection
is a mirror at the bottom
of the world where we gather
to divine what will remain.
The next moment, it’s the reflection
we run away from when the flames
rise & start licking the wires
between poles. One moment,
people in the streets are a river
picking up speed as the sirens
get closer. The next moment,
police lined up with shields
& clubs in their fists are just
another wall to throw rocks at.
I remember sleeves of tear gas
hazing the streets. Consuelo
ducking me under her shawl,
saying we needed to escape
the commotion—how quickly
it came to me where we might
find some privacy & a bird’s-eye
view of the drop to a new
low of lawlessness.
At the top of the Ferris wheel, the city
on the other side of the blackout, dressed
in bridges & blinking lights, stared
at our sudden death with an utter lack
of surprise. Windows wide awake
mocked our existence on the wrong side
of the wall. But this moment—stranded
at the apex of the dark, after the veins of all
machinery ran dry, before the panic settled
to dull frustration—when Consuelo seized
my wrist white, told me always in her dreams
an anguished dog yearns to be saved
from the argument it’s having with its tail.
This blackout is what it wanted, to be taken
by the scruff, to be stranded in an instant
where the difference between life and death
is a hummingbird. She took my hand into
her dress, told me the difference was smoke,
a snuffed candle’s hair. The difference between
black & black if it bled. In between her thighs
the weather was strawberries, the weather
was her rushing to get me inside.
To say I love you put a bird on a wire
so I told her enough times to get an abacus
going in the sky. To follow her body
made my heartbeat a flight of stairs,
of swallows twisting up to the tower
of a bell which went silent on the condition
of Consuelo & me & dusk & the roofs suddenly
everywhere around us. We weren’t afraid,
what people thought of us on a distant
ship that would never reach the shore,
& since every day Death said hello in
a different manner, not one kiss went
missing, not one ecstatic gaze, nor
the desire to love each other above
the apathy of passing cars, the people
coming to church, crossing themselves
& us, giving up their blessing by mistake.
The paletero barking out his flavors,
making us laugh, because what kind
of ice cream man is angry.
Looking to get my name written on
a tiny skull, I chose Co
nsuelo’s instead.
Paid the vendor with a hole in his hand,
that coin slot bribed barely, but this time
for good. Walked away from his smile,
let the sugar dissolve on my tongue,
& soon enough a town surviving
like a fire at the bottom of an ocean
became a memory of the future:
where a gate keeps the lunatic eyes from trotting down,
where the feast wolves want in the yards is bound to happen,
where the wind that trickles downhill to breeze thru plumage is God,
& branches hold the sleeping hens that blink in & out of my dreams like devices.
Instructions or, Consuelo’s Yes
Tear a window on the pomegranate’s
flesh, smell the bright blood
of its seeds, rest it on the shoulder
of the grave, let that wound be a light
you left on, place it in the manner
that best punctuates the still life:
gravestone, gray flowers, grade
of moss & lichen grimed over
a three-year Fall. Walk the path
away. Think of the garden you’ll inherit
if you turn back, patina on petals, cobweb
branches, foliage veiled with time lost.
Red for the dismantled weight of your thoughts,
red for promises of bloodshed on billboards lit up & for once, unkept,
red for the tablecloth snatched out perfectly from underneath Death’s supper.
Take the memory of that scent, lock it
in a drawer whose key you’ll have to
swallow. With you there are moments
sunlight never touches with its fingertips.
With you fire-damp flowers that sway
on a seafloor. With you this need
to arrive at a glowing curtain, enter
the photo booth, & let it give you
a strip of your real face to place
in the corner of your vanity.
The first time I saw Death her dress
was a tripwire. I found a man slumped
under the branches of a huizache, held
hostage by the heat to its shade, his hand
over the wound in his stomach like a lid
that must throttle. He didn’t ask for help
or water. He looked up, gave me the lame
bird of his handshake. Whispered for me
to sit down next to him. So I could see
what he was seeing: in the distance a city
underwater, the Skinny Lady severing
a silver thread with her scythe.