A dung beetle climbed out of the dead
man’s mouth. He let his last breath sail &
it was the horned kind we used to find
belly up after they battered their bodies
against the wall of our house. Even if you
won’t hear me out, I plucked it from his lips,
did what we did back then—leashed its horn
with twine, took it for a walk, & in the end
that was the spark that led me to a tunnel
lit by fluorescent miles of thought, shrines
to Malverde couched into its walls, & an orange
Datsun waiting where an actual road began.
Got out of the Datsun, found myself at
the bottom of a day lit up by the barking
of dogs that appeared on roofs of every
house, tricksters came out of corners selling
hits they called el rompecielos. The more
I kept going, the deeper into the noise I got.
A woman showed me the Dance of Death
tattoo on her inner thighs, & I knew I was
in Sumidero. By dusk that was me soaring
upside down, spun in the sky from a pole
wearing the wings of an eagle, & only that
woman with eyes the color black if it bled
could talk me down.
Paloma Negra or, Topito’s Mistake
What I remember—getting tapped
on the shoulder, eyes like invitations
to edge the lake, her nakedness
like a moon to my fingertips.
On my tongue, a glowing I could taste. Doors
that opened to the pennies of a field,
getting chased by lightning,
waking with blackened fingernails.
From the footstep my body burned
into grass, I rose & remembered
being told, this is what you deserve,
a kiss that spiraled down a stairwell,
dripping in the dark.
That’s why Winter
never found me, why I keep a moth
in my wallet, & listen to branches
raking knots out of the wind’s hair.
Consuelo Gone
Her eyes were a rifle & I was standing
in the way of the door, & finally when I
moved to let her go, the void she threw
open became a table, an emptiness born
to stand on its head. I ate supper there
every day, with forks & knives that had
to cut nothing into bread, with strays
that crept in to sniff the invention of my
hand, ask what my name was before this
all happened. Death entered, with mud
& rain helpless to ruin the polish on his
boots. With a jug of wine we toasted away
the love my life was not huge enough
to hold. Once he left, leaves & laughter
came in, branches of sound grew around me
like a forest, cicadas built a droning kingdom
with the random throats of toads. Swallows
one after another flew in to cake mud-nests
in my rafters, until cries for worms hatched
everywhere above me, & the only difference
between my pain & the world’s pain for me
was the door I could have closed.
One Day a River Won’t Stop Leaving My Mouth
Ruined where no hand
could reach me, I tapped
my life on the shoulder,
introduced it to scorched
grass, my past the horizon
I tore myself away from.
I turned myself in, gave up
the names of everyone &
everything I knew. I lost
my trial under neon tents
for generations to come. Guilty
of wanting to whitewash the
billboard cunt of the sky.
Guilty of letting the stations
that stay lit up all night with
second thoughts go to hell
in my rearview mirror.
Guilty of conspiring to find
the tunnel that connects Malverde
to all Topos. That next day
I was ushered to an office whose
only furniture was a chair on fire—
told my sentence would begin
from the chair, walked thru
the back door to approach the crowd
outside. Where an absurdist theatre
would come to its climax by breaking
the fourth wall. My new line
of work—be the man burning
when the announcement
to the crowd rings out: The allegory
of life in the vicinity of death tells us
night & noon coincide in human moments
all the time. Scrape the dark dearly
enough, the Skinny Lady will dangle
her jeweled hand out for a kiss!
Let the rifle sleep & take the path
scuffed by the limping herdsmen,
who threw anger at decades
of cattle to skirt them uphill.
Ask the emerald beetle wallowing
in a mound of shit, the lizard born
to a life of side-glancing, for cues.
Let a line of ants lead you to the hill’s
shoulder, where the only clock
is a candle that keeps a picture
of a dead man from flying away.
Marigolds mark the edge where he leapt,
rather than have his obedience at gunpoint
filmed then sent to his family, rather than go
down in his casket with no gold in his smile.
Memorize the candle’s prayer:
It’s possible to own what’s missing, to hear the devil grin, & know the meaning of pain. It’s possible to hold what’s missing in a cage, to know it like the ghost of a chandelier, as the swallow you think is trapped in the rafters above you, to keep it locked in a cabinet whose key you’ll never borrow—but also it’s possible to let what’s missing fly, to have smoke poured into the bowl of your hands & pick up water. To know the deepest losses end always with shadows grazing, teeth tearing sparks from the steaming ground.
The Wall Commonly Known as the Brow of God
In Sumidero, the wall is always
looming, night & day our North Star,
blunt reminder of the difference between
this life & the one in El Norte. By far
the reason why the ground is gutted with
tunnels, decades of desperate maneuvers,
so many names trapped in trying. If not
a tunnel that connects a pink corner store
basement to the bathroom of a Texaco
where a razor & a change of clothes wait,
then a tunnel that connects a restaurant
table always reserved to the empty pool
of a house in Calexico. If not the tunnel
that takes you to a Malverde shrine
in Agua Prieta said to be teeming with luck,
then a tunnel that runs thru a copper mine
to a greenhouse in Las Cruces. The above-
ground alternatives: snake yourself into
the engine block of a truck, agree to have
your body stacked under cargo, endure
the heat rising exponentially, in a trailer
inching toward the border, with a sea
of other vehicles all in the same limbo.
Covering desert, valley, & mountains.
The wall is an endless mind of steel
bars east of Nogales, creased slabs
in the worst parts of Sumidero, where
many use the barrier as the fourth wall
of their homes. Some sections of the wall
are rigged with ground sensors & tracked
by drones, & some are an open invitation
to walk a cemetery of scorched sand. But
the section stitched into the minds of everyone
that lives here is the section of the wall most
have never seen: miles away where they say
the wall goes into the ocean, & the constant fog
serves to hide that it ends, or to maintain
the awe of it going all the way across.
Death the Man Always in the Pink Corner Store Buying Nothing
Bodies hung from
a bridge, four women,
five men. One by
the ankle, another by
the wrist, the rest
by the obvious.
I stepped forward—
a sound like kazoos
swarmed my head,
lured into looking past
their shoes, trying
to read the messages
carved into torsos.
But shots fired made
me slip death for a silver
moment, forced me
to regain the most
basic composure.
I pulled out my weapon
& wheeled brashly
into the open—
took aim & lucked out
before he did, fired at a man
I had seen plenty of times
at the pink corner store
buying nothing.
The third shot caught
his right hand,
& he just dropped
& sat there, shrinking under
the pointy brim of his hat,
muttering to the bright
wound in his palm.
I brought my shadow over,
began to pace around him
but he never looked up,
just kept muttering
to the lake in his hand.
Maybe he saw a tunnel
at the bottom of it.
I cocked the hammer
back out of respect
& sent him thru it.
Consuelo’s Promise
Guilty of ritual vandalism,
of a free spirit’s heresy. Guilty
of finding a tunnel that
connected sixty-eight murders
to a fit of ecstasy. Consuelo
ushered into a room, asked
for her name hundreds of times,
sometimes politely, sometimes
with a sneer—told her real name
was Confundida, then ordered
to chalk the wall every time
she gets it right. Let out once
the distinction between love
& loss dissolved inside her.
Blindfolded, dropped off
at an intersection with no
choice but to wonder, by
the way people looked
at her—what in the world
they did to her. She put
her head down, kept walking
until she came to the wall,
found a space where someone
rigged a mirror with wire
along with a cup & toothbrush.
Shaken by the face they tried to
give her—half of her hair cut off,
lit up with rage, but already
calming it down to a flame—already
mischief in the promise that might
take the rest of her life to keep.
Missing (Consuelo’s List)
The sunlight we caught like water
in our palms, splashing signals to each other
from pocket mirrors—where did it go?
One beat, hello; two beats, I’ll be naked
& waiting. The kisses that kept our lips
burning, the night a pair of swings
waited in the weather of a sparkless yard,
the house no one owned or looked at.
Even in the deepest dark the unleashed
laughter, getting home to raise a window
& sleep to wind shampooing the heads
of trees. The sex invented for the occasion
of a lake. When did flames leap into the lap
of those branches, when did neighborhoods
disappear like people inside imposters—
we once knew? Battles worth coming out
alive from, roosters that pecked for seeds
in our footsteps. Now we can’t know
what crime made that go missing, what
sleep evened us out. The deer that stared
into our bedrooms dissolved into what
night, answered whose call behind the necks
of trees that never let them come back?
Even nights of recent rain, oil-stain
streets where we watched ourselves walk
upside down for hours. Even in broad daylight
the river of shadows cast down, wings
that swept the daydream away from
our hearts—those birds found a hole
in the sky where? And what about
the flashing scales of fish we once found
startled on the dock—like coins trying
to flip themselves back into water?
The Next Life
The deck of cards we’ve been afraid
to part for the unlit side of our lives
sits there holding down a table next
to a glass of water the sun might have
poured. The curandero we’ve put off
visiting for years, refusing the bright
distance between reason & belief,
avoiding the drive from several deserts
away to the noiseless town where he lives,
dreading the house where he’ll point out
the pain we’ve cradled like wet firewood,
where he’ll tell us whose jealousy hasn’t
let the tall grass sway in our sleep; not
wanting to be in the room where he’ll
describe the flower we must steal, tell us
whose picture we must bury in its place
to let the past know it’s been uprooted.
But the time comes to rig the Cutlass
Supremes of our fathers, arrive where
every brown-eyed denizen starts giving
us directions before we even say his name.
Time comes to knock on the door,
enter that tunnel when his teenage sons
answer, invite us to sit in the patio
while they fix the stereo of a black Mazda
to the chopped & screwed music we once
hated to the point of love. When the curandero
finally appears, he blots out the imposing
figure we wanted him to be: hoodie sweater,
baseball cap that sends his ears out like a bat.
Smaller & younger & more clean-shaven.
Before we can change our minds we find
ourselves ducked into a room lit by
the deck & the glass of water the sun
could have poured. We sit down, try
to be clever by parting only one card
off the top, but he doesn’t even notice,
spreads the cards on the table. The four
we choose when the little man turns
them—windows that let out the wind.
Hourglass with Bat Wings
5.
With boots we’ve offered
to landmark the sky, tossed up,
caught by the wire as a handcuffed pair
of notes, as bats that would sing
upside down had we not cut out
their tongues to make cradles
4.
for slingshots. Under the barking
of the brightest star, we perfected
ourselves from looking back,
left love like cards of the highest
hand facedown on the table,
& set out—with ambitions to fail
as many times as n
ecessary, find
ourselves barefoot on the other side
of the bribes yellowing the grass
3.
of our youth. Aspirations to be the ones
staggering into the porch-light
of a stranger who would give us
three months’ work timbering pine.
We paid a cybercafé attendant with
no face, a pool hustler, a pastel blue
prostitute, finally found the coyote
who led us to the tunnel that connects
a payphone in a field of maize to
a parking lot surrounded by desert
in every direction. By walking
three days under the clean stare
2.
of a sun we took to be shining
upside down, by finding mirrors
of water we could never drink.
By selling the best years of our lives
to Death, who turned them into a pair
of songs on the jukebox, we got
1.
the desperate money we needed, paid
the best lookout along the wall—
a twelve-year-old with the hair
of a caterpillar—who knew when shifts
ended, which agents liked to nap.
Part III
The sadness of a fully dressed man walking underwater. Denizen of a fountain, a bottom where voices are heard long after their wavering faces withdraw. Watching people’s wishes flutter down to my palm, while pinning heartbreak, severed flight, & midair murder, on Consuelo, a rifle hidden in her summer dress—& the witnesses who claimed she knew no better might be the same thieves who noticed my insignificant splash & dragged me out of the water for the coins in my fists—then left me at the door of a curandera who kept an orphanage for animals that refuse the bit. She pulled out a piece of smoke, tied it to my belt loop. Now walk into no doors & under no shade. Come back after the Litany of Saints. None of which made sense to a heart not done with falling. But when I returned Consuelo waited on top of a brown horse, & the pattern on its back I read as the white of an old world, so many crashed moths. The saddle is brief, the curandera told me, get on behind her. We climbed up to the faces of rocks exhausted by the crossing out of names. The roofs quietly below us—when something entirely not her, not me, agreed to the gallop that poured us down, over jagged stairs of rock, buzzing shrubs, past every wire held by the thoughts of trees. Given over, flying down, taken before yes or no intervene. For the first few seconds after I swore, not weight, not steam, not the mute wild hair of a comet—that what I felt leaving was not from us at all. Nor from the horse catching its breath in one color.