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- you bring out the Mexican in me. the hunkered thick dark spiral. the core of a heart howl. the bitter bile.
- you are the one i'd let go the other loves for, surrender my one-woman house
- the holocaust of desire in me
- before Mexicana flight #729 en route to Mexico City departs from San Antonio International Airport I buy a 69-cent disposable razor at the gift shop because I forgot in Mexico they don't like hair under your arms only on your legs and plan to / shave before landing but the stewardess handing out declaration forms has given me the wrong one assuming I'm Mexican but I am! and I have to run up the aisle and ask for a U.S. citizen form instead because I'm well how do I explain? / except before you know it we're already crossing the volcanoes and descending into the valley of Mexico City and I have to rush to the back while the plane drops too quickly as if the pilot's in a hurry to get home / and into the little airplane bathroom where lots of couples want to coitus fantisizus but / I only want to get rid of my underarm hair quick before the plane touches down in the land of los nopales disregarding lights blinking kindly return to your seat and fasten your seatbelt all in Spanish of course just in time / for flight #729 to deposit me finally into the arms of awaiting Mexican kin on my father's side of the family where I open my arms wide armpits clean as a newborn's soul without original sin and embrace them like the good girl my father would have them believe I am.
- I served and followed, harbored up my things and pilgrimed with him.
- and I vigiled that solitude, my life. I labored love, fierce stitched and fed him. Bedded and wifed him. He never disappointed, hurt, abandoned. Husband, love, my life -- poem.
- first there is the scent of barley to remember. barley and rain. the smooth terrain to recollect and savor
- Unforgiving whiteness of the room. Ambiguity of linen. Purity Mute and still as the photographs on the moon.
- Everything here must be analyzed. Catalogued. Studied twice. A painstaking arrangement, almost vain.
- Gullible as foreigners. A greedy chattering, endlessly on nothing. Nothing at all.
- with my heart thudding on the back bumper of a flatbed truck
- No doubt you're Villa and I'm Pershing's dizzy troops. No doubt I'm euclyptus and you a California conflagration. No doubt you're eucharist, Euclidean geometry, World War II's Gibraltar strait, the Chinese traders of Guangzhou, Zapatistas breakfasting at Sanborn's, Sassoferrato's cobalt blue, Museo Poldi Pezzoli's insurance rate, Gaudi's hammer against porcelain plates.
- the elegance / of your jaguar mouth
- undid the knot the ribbons / the silk flags of motion / unraveled from under / the flesh of the wrists / the stone of the lungs / something like water / broke free the prayer / of the heart / the grief of the hands / crooned sweet when / you held me / dissolved knee into knee / belly into belly / an alphabet of limbs / ran urgently / nudged loose a pebble / a pearl / a noose undoing its greed / and we were Buddha / and we were Jesus / and we were Allah / at once / a Ganges absolving / language woman man
- you my saltwater pearl, my mother, my father, my bastard child, heaven and hurt, you my slavery of sadness, my wrinkled heart. / little coin of my eye, my tulip, my tin cup
- damn these damn hours between me, you. cities and deserts and hours and hours that widen like dreams. and dreams that narrow like bridges. and seconds endless as all of Texas lethargic and thick under the dogday heat. / hurry. what matters is to be inside the prayer of your body, beneath the wings of your eyes
- make love to me in spanish. not with that other tongue. i want you juntito a mi, tender like the language crooned to babies. i want to be that lullabied, mi bien querido, that loved. / i want you inside the mouth of my heart, inside the harp of my wrists, the sweet meat of mango, in the gold that dangles from my ears and neck. / say my name. say it. the way it's supposed to be said. i want to know that i knew you even before i knew you.
- your voice small. heat of your eyes, how i would've placed y mouth on each. / said corazon and the word blazed like a branch of jacaranda.
- i've cut my hair / you can't tug / my hair anymore / a jet of black / through the fingers now
- your hands cool along the jaw / skin of the eyelids nape of the neck soft as a mouth / and when we open like apple split each other in half and have seen the heart of the heart of the heart that part you don't i don't show anymore the part we want to reel / back as soon as it is suddenly unreeled like silk flag or the prayer call of a Mohamed we won't have a word for this except perhaps religion
- you're new. you can't hurt me yet. (...) i like the possibility of anything, the little fear i feel when you enter a room. i haven't a clue of the who of you.
- And what if you do like me? And what if you do? I can't thin. Dress myself in slinky black, my 14-karat hoops and my velvet spikes. Smoke two cigars. I'm doing loopity loops. / Listen--cars roar by. All night. I'm waiting for the one that stops. All my life. Listen-- Hear that? Yikes.
- My body, this / body, that has / nothing to do / with who / I am.
- sinew / and twist of flesh, / helix of desire & vanity.
- My body. Ours / swallowing each other / whole. This. That.
- I'm not / the kind of woman who telephones in the middle of the night, -- who told you that? -- splitting the night like machete. Before and after. After. Before. No, no, not me. I'm not / the she who slings words bigger than rocks, sharper than Houdini knives, verbal Molotovs. The one who did that -- yo no fui -- that wasn't me.
- I'm no hysteric, terrorist, emotional anarchist. / I keep inside a pumpkin shell. There I do very well. / Shut a blind eye to where my pumpkin-eater roams. / I keep like a fruitcake. Subsist on air. Not a worry nor care. Please. I'm as free for the taking as the eyes of Saint Lucy. No trouble at all. / I swear, I swear, I swear...
- And I could use the stink of a good cigar -- even though the sun's out. The grackles in the trees. The grackles inside my heart. Broken feathers and stiff wings. / I could jump. But I don't. You could kill me. But you won't. / The grackles calling to each other. The long hours. The long hours. The long hours.
- An antique habit from last summer when we pulled each other into the heat of groin and belly, slept with an arm around the other. / The Texas sun was like that. Like a body asleep beside you.
- But when I open my eyes to the flannel and down, mist at the window and blue light from the bay, I remember where I am. / This weight on the other side of the bed is only books, not you. What I said I loved more than you. True. / Though these mornings I wish books loved back.
- The last cigar snuffed in its ashes. And a heavy dose of poems. / At two a.m., you know that can't be good for you. But there I go, arteries cracking like artillery when I dial.
- And when I'm through hurling words as big as stones, slashing the air with my tongue, detonating wives and setting babies crying. / And when my lovers are finished telling me--You're nuts, / Go screw yourself, / Stop yelling and speak English please! / After everything that's breakable is broken, the silence expensive, the dial tone howling like my heart.
- I'd like to give without disgrace my name. To search for he, for she / who is my own to keep exclusively. To neither give away nor loan. / I want to know how love can grow irrevocable and prove the fable true. / A love exists that gives. / And won't take back what's given. Like the men.
- Unaware is how Death will find you. Coiled in your righteous sleep.
- Thing in my shoe, dandelion, thorn, thumbprint, one grain of grief that has me undone once more, oh my father, heartily sorry am I for this right-side of the brain who has alarmed & maimed and laid me many a day now invalid low. I should know, I'm full if its decibel. This me that is me that is mine all mine under one and twenty eiderdowns. I confess / a certain foppy sappiness regular as the 26-day flow, like the macabre Carlotta. Under duress. I sprout like the potato in its greedy gloom. Yowl like the black cat howling with its rowdy need. Shut up! What I want is to be / saved like the lucky fuck when the gypsies arrive in the nick,
- There's a poem in my head / like too many cups of coffee. / A pea under twenty eiderdowns. A sadness in my heart like stone. A telephone. And always my / night madness that outs like bats across this Texas sky.
- I'm a woman delighted with her disasters. They give me something to do. A profession of sorts.
- In dreams the origami of the brain opens like a fist, a pomegranate, an expensive geometry.
- When you're 36 and seething like 16 next to the telephone, and you don't know where. And worse -- with whom? / I don't care for this fruit. This Mexican love hidden in the boot. This knotted braid. Birthcord buried beneath the knuckle of the heart.
- Screen / doors banging raspy. / Brain a whorl of swirling / fish. Oh, not like this. / Not this.
- droopy as a sunflower...
- and the fractured marriage weighing on your head / like a crown of thorns.
- my seasonal lovers have come and gone. and you were there, friend, cold as porcelain, mute as the milk moon. i was afraid of you then.
- Did you notice I never hovered in the cab of your pickup when we good-byed, when the pecan trees rustled and shushed. / A pink lantern burning patient on my porch. Nipped kiss. Screen door slammed. I danced barefoot with the cat / when I was alone.
- My head split in two -- half of me preening its feathers / the other watching from a stool and sneering -- Fool!
- Isn't it funny. / He acting Mexican. / You white.
- Nor any of those you've hugged and held, so foreign from the country we shared.
- And you were there, Lorenzo. The cathedral smoky-eyed and still rising like a pyramid after all these centuries. You named the four holy centers -- Amecameca, Tepeyac, and two others I can't remember. I remember you, querida flecha, and how all the words I knew left me. The ones in English and the few in Spanish too.
- Lorenzo, is the center of the universe always so lonely at night and so crowded in the day? Earlier I'd been birthed from the earth when the metro bust loose at noon. Stumbled up the steps over Bic pens embroidered with Batman logos, red extension cords, vinyl wallets, velveteen roses, pumpkin seed vendors, brilliant masons looking for work. I remember the boy with the burnt foot carried by his mother, the smell of meat frying, a Styrofoam plate sticky with grease.
- lights bright as an ice cream parlor, / faces sweaty and creased with grief. / My first pulque warm and frothy like semen.
- When we meet again beside what river? / But this was no poem. Only mosquitoes / biting like hell and a good-bye / kiss like a mosquito bite that left / me mad for hours.
- Lorenzo, I forget what's real. I mix up the details of what happened with what I witnessed inside my universe. Is it like that for you? But I thought for a moment, I really did, that a kiss could be a universe. Or sex. Or love, that old shoe. See. Still hopeless. Still writing poems for pretty men. Half of me alive again. The other shouting from the sidelines, Sit down, clown. / Ah, Lorenzo, I'm a fool. Eternity or bust. That's how it is with me. Even if eternity is simply one kiss, one night, one moment. And if love isn't eternal, what's the point? / If I knew the words I'd explain how a man loves a woman before love and how he loves her after is never the same. How the two halves split and can't be put back whole again. Isn't it a shame? / You named the holy centers but forgot one -- the heart. Said every time you'd pass this zocalo you'd think of me and that kiss from the center of the universe. / I remember you, Lorenzo. See this zocalo? Remember me.
- One could give up as well the nuisance of surviving.
- At any moment, a precise second might claim you. / At any decisive point, God might not give a damn. / You're there, in that city. You don't count. You're not history.
- I'm a woman like you. / I don't count either. / Not a thing I say. / Not a thing I do.
- I swear, I will not let go to these small madnesses at two a.m. I will not be manic as a Marilyn Monroe seeking her savior-executioner. I will not love like heroin, be martyr of extreme self-inflicted gried, nor romance myself into a tired "Fin."
- Fat as an oyster, pulp as a plum, raw, exposed, naive, dumb. As if love could be curbed, and grace could save you from the daily beatings.
- I guess life presents you choices and you choose. Smarter over the years. Oh smarter. The sensible thing smarting over the years, the sensible thing to excess, I guess.
- Before you became a cloud, you were an ocean, roiled and murmuring like a mouth. You were the shadow of a cloud crossing over a field of tulips. You were the tears of a man who cried into a plaid handkerchief. You were a sky without a hat. Your heart puffed and flowered like sheets drying on a line. / And when you were a tree, you listened to trees and the tree things trees told you. You were the wind in the wheels of a red bicycle. You were the spidery Maria tattooed on the hairless man of a boy in downtown Houston. You were the rain rolling off the waxy leaves of a magnolia tree. A lock of straw-colored hair wedged between the mottled pages of a Victor Hugo novel. A crescent of soap. A spider the color of a fingernail. The black nets beneath the sea of olive trees. A skein of blue wool. A tea saucer wrapped in newspaper. An empty cracker tin. A bowl of blueberries in heavy cream. White wine in a green-stemmed glass. / And when you opened your wings to the wind, across the punched-tin sky above a prison courtyard, those condemned to death and those condemned to life watched how smooth and sweet a white cloud glides.
- You come from that town split / down the center like a cleft lip. / You come from the world / with a river running through it. / The dead. The living. / The river Styx.
- No wonder the clouds laugh each time they cross without papers.
- I'd be your clown / I'd tell you funny stories and / paint clouds on the walls of my house / dress the bed in its best linen / And while you slept / I'd hold my breath and watch / you move like a sunflower / How beautiful you are / like the color inside an ear / like a conch shell / like a Modigliani nude
- i'll cut a bit of your hair this time / so that you'll never leave me / ah, the softest hair / ah, the softest
- If / you came back / I'd give you parrot tulips and papayas / laugh at your stories / Or I wouldn't say a word which, / as you know, is hard for me / I know when you grew tired / off you'd go to Patagonia / Cairo Island / Katmandu / Laredo / Meanwhile / I'll have savored you like an oyster / memorized you / held you under my tongue / learned you by heart / So that when you leave / I'll write poems
- and I think a man who grows morning glories / because he loves their beautifulness, must be a beautiful man
- Here. I want to make a gift of this fan. Write my name on it for you / to place in this man's house of yours. Perhaps to stake I've been here. / Only a fan. Not a glass shoe. Not a pomegranate seed. Not a coffee / cup or key. You'll smooth the sheets. Punch the bruised pillows / when I'm gone. It will be as it was before. Mundo sin jin. / The silences again tugged taut as linen.
- and my purple sequins, and my cowboy boots. / and I am going to be there with a six-pack and this poem, / like any fool who loves to look at a cloud, or evening poppy, or a red red pickup truck.
- wachale! she's a black lace bra kind of woman, the kind who serves up suicide with every kamikaze poured in the neon blue of evening
- I've gambled bad odds and sat shotgun when she rambled her '59 pontiac between the blurred lines dividing sense from senselessness
- Woman zydeco-ing into her own decade. / 30 years pleated behind her like / the wail of a San Antonio accordion. / And now the good times are coming. Girl, / I tell you, the good times are here.
- The kind that learned to spit at 13 and still is doing it.
- picked up words that / snapped like bra straps. / learned words that ignite / of their own gas / (...) fell in love with words / that thudded like stones and sticks. / or stung like fists.
- hairy as kiwi fruit and silly, the shaving stubble against the purity of porcelain
- the miscellany of maleness: nail clippers and keys, tobacco and ashes, pennies quarters nickles dimes and dollars folded into complicated origami, stub of ticket and pencil and cigarette, and the crumb of the pockets / all scattered on the irish linen of the bedside table
- because someone once / said Don't / do that! / you like to do it.
- Gelatinous. Steamy and lovely to the light to look at like a good glass of burgundy. Suddenly I'm artist each month. The star inside this like a ruby. Fascinating bits of sticky I-don't-know-what-stuff. The afterbirth without the birth. The jobs of a strawberry jam. Membrane stretchy like saliva in your hand. / It's important you feel its slickness, understand the texture isn't bloody at all. That you don't gush between the legs. Rather, it unravels itself like a string from some deep deep center -- like a Russian subatomic submarine, or better, like a mad Karlov cackling...
- and the way / it metamorphosizes! dazzles. / changing daily like starlight.
- Think / Persian rug. / But thicker. Think / cello. But richer. / A sweet exotic snuff / from an ancient prehistoric center. / Dark, distinct, / and excellently female.
- What are you thinking about when you look like that? We do not belong one to the other except now and again intermittently. Of that infinity, freely you give yourself to me to take / and I take freely.
- I love you languid like this, a vain man, and leisurely I love the slim limbs and slim bones. You're very pretty primped and pretty proud as any man is wont to be. You're eternally mine to look at and paint as I see fit.
- Wars / and love and love and wars have disunited and united us. All the same, I look back and looking back I am reflected in that mirror, you with your back to me, me facing backwards. Little one, I love / you. I can't forget you. You can't forget me. I won't let you.
- He remembers a Mexican Marlon Brando on French tv. How, in westerns, the Mexicans are always the bad guys. And -- Is it true all Mexicans carry knives?
- I paint my toes matador red. Snap freshly dried sheets. Pull taut. Tuck corners. Wax floors. Rub mirrors. Oil my body and sleep / under the midnoon eye.
- Inspect my body where the tan line stops abrupt as a stand-up comic. Silly belly soft as the yolk of an egg. / I wash with soap made from Italian honey. Wrap a clean towel around my hair. Perfume skin. Paint lips into a perfect bull's-eye.
- admire clouds, how they travel with the grace of snails.
- My goddess Guadalupe is / more powerful than your god Marx.
- V) In the clatter of your departures, I write poems.
- Shaken the sheets and slumped those fat pillows like tired tongues out the window for air & sun to get to.
- Coffee's good. Dust motes somersault and spin. House clean. I'm alone again. Amen.
- I want to take you up to the roof. At sunset the grackles make a wonderful racket. You can come whenever you want. And nobody will have to talk / if we don't want to.
- Arturito, when you were born the hospital gasped when they fished you from your fist of sleep, a rude welcome you didn't like one bit, and I don't blame you. The world's a mess.
- __And everyone said "Ay!" / or "Oh!" depending on their native tongue.
- First, I wish you noble like Zapata, because a man is one who guards those weaker than himself. Second, I wish you a Gandhi wisdom, he knew power is not the fist, he knew the power of the powerless. Third, I wish you Mother Teresa generous. Because the way of wealth is giving yourself away to others.
- Only child playing with your only self.
- How your heart opened like silk. The crooked spin of horizon. That awful slant of sky. And finally, the ripcord and the yank / of life to bring you back to earth.
- but instead of love there was only an old sleeping bag you tossed at me & three flea bites on my belly the next morning
- I went into your room and lay down on your bed just to see if it'd suit me. The sheets were cool and a fine talc of dust lay everywhere the way some men who live alone are used to living. / Oh I'm scared all right. Haven't you noticed, I'm only shy when I like a man. And to tell the truth I'm not sure love is worth the risk of losing friendship.
- I tell you, nights like these, something bubbles from the tips of our pointy boots to the top of our coyote yowl.
- What I want to say, querido, is / hunger is not romantic to the hungry. What I want to say is / fear is not so thrilling if yo're the one afraid. / What I want to say is / poverty's not quaint when it's your house you can't escape from. / Decay's not beautiful to the decayed. / What's beauty?
- (What's beauty?) A reptile stiletto that could puncture a heart. / A brick through the windshield that means I love you. / A hurt that bangs on the door.
- Look, I hate to break it to you, but this isn't Venice or Buenos Aires. / This is San Antonio. / That mirror isn't a yard sale. It's a fire. And these are remnants of what could be carried out and saved.
- Dark wine reminds me of you. The burgundies and cabernets. The tang and thrum and hiss that spiral like Egyptian silk, blood bit from a lip, black smoke from a cigarette. / Nights that swell like cork.
- Something of you still taut still tugs still pulls, a rope that trembled hummed between us. Hummed, love, didn't it. Love, how it hummed.
- when all along / i thought that's what a woman was.
- The mob arrives with stones and sticks to maim and lame and do me in. All the same, when I open my mouth, they wobble like gin. / Diamonds and pearls tumble from my tongue. / Or toads and serpents. Depending on the mood I'm in.
oct 3 2015 ∞
nov 10 2023 +
nov 10 2023 +