birds near calexico-va

8/6/2019 Birds Near Calexico-Va

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Birds Near Calxico

Birds Near Calxico


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Birds Near Calxico

Agripina Vsquez Gonzlez

and Evon Comstock Morris

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Birds Near Calxico

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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Birds Near Calxico

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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Birds Near Calxico

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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