hopeless breast milk smell. Smell of Morelos gardens
still in blouses. Burning stink of running.
2.
I did not need to run.
I had a paper moon. Stamped and certified. Mine was
a colonia moon, a barrio moon, a suburban moon. I
knew where I was, where I was supposed to be, where
I was allowed to go, and that was anywhere. We lived
the outhouse moon, the tortilla moon, the channel
12 bullfight Tijuana moon. And then we migrated
north, like monarchs, following the light.
And my moon was a Boy Scout moon.
A campout moon.
A drive-in triple feature moon.
• • •
My moon remained poor as a rusted coin in a frozen pond.
But documented. The green men in the tan trucks could
read my belonging by this moon’s light. Gave us the all-
clear to walk, work, die on ground our ancestors had
forgotten. Let us don Bat Patrol patches and Troop 260
uniforms and hike the ridgelines where the Mexica had
taken Huitzilopochtli in their arms and begun their 100 year
walk to the south.
My moon rose over tidy houses.
3.
She ran.
She ran all her life. She ran to stay ahead of charging
darkness, galloping hunger. She ran west to el poniente,
north toward winter and Mictlán, land of the dead. Worked
the light of the moon in her small hands the color of earth:
she molded moonglow into trinkets traded for coins the color
of sun. Wove moon into bracelets she traded for perfume.
Worked the ceremonial motel chambers, swept the floors of the
moneyed, folded bloody sheets and knelt at toilets, scrubbing
sins of the mighty from their seats.
• • •
Everyone moving north.
She was thirteen:
Mactlactli ihuan yei.
I was ten:
Mactlactli.
Somehow
she came to rest in my house. Trucks could not track her
for an hour. Dogs could not follow her scent. She was on
that invisible railroad to Los Angeles. Enemy city of the Great
Walled City of Tijuanatlán. I was in the invisible mountains
of Cuyamaca, walking in the ghost footprints of vanished
hunters
in their tribes, wondering where their arrows went. And
she slept
in my bed.
Too tired to eat or join in the gathered laughter of my
livingroom,
she slept in my bed. She lay in my sheets, smelling the odor of
Thunderbird and America and her eyes pulled themselves closed
to protect her. Dreams of home.
• • •
4.
I came in and found her.
I came in and found her.
Is there any other story? Any other legend to tell? I came home.
I found her.
Her head on my pillow.
The first woman to ever sleep in my bed.
Her hair
black across my pillow, spilling toward earth, reaching for
the heart
of Ce Anáhuac, the One World. Her eyebrows shallow as streams
fringed in cress and licorice in Cuyamaca shadows. Her
brown brow,
unlined. One hand, fingers curled, nails pale small shells
against the
Chichimeca shore of her skin.
Her breath
making small melodies of breezes and tides.
• • •
And me, holding my breath.
The thrum and sigh,
thrum and sigh,
thrum and sigh
of her sleep.
5.
Then they woke her. She didn’t want to wake. She didn’t want
to rise. She didn’t want to go. I didn’t want them to wake her.
I wanted to sleep beside her. I didn’t know anything else that
men wanted to happen in a bed with a woman. I wanted
to sleep.
Beside her. I did not know the language of beds. I wanted to pass
through the door of her color. I wanted to pray in her temple
of hair.
She knew more than I did about this new language. She blushed
when she saw me at worship. I blushed discovered in my
beholding.
We touched hands. Hello. We touched hands. Adiós.
Then they tucked her in the back seat of a 1964 car,
smuggled her
under blankets through trucks up freeways laden with
runners,
north, where she’d bask in the light of a thousand toilets,
where her
nails would break on their porcelain, where she’d sweep
more sheets
off more beds where she could not afford to sleep, where
helicopters
searched her alleys with burning eyes all night, where she
could speak
to no one and no one could speak to her
except to give her orders:
Girlie get your ass over here and wipe this up. You come when I
tell you to come and you do it now. Have papers? Do you like this,
you do, don’t you? You like this. I’ll teach you a little something
right here and now.
That night I lay in her outline on my sheets.
She was hot as sunburn on the cotton.
I sank my face
into the imprint of hers,
her perfume
crept from the pillow,
the smell of her memories:
I smelled her mother
in a kitchen with clay pots
and cilantro on her hands:
it was all there: it is still there:
hibiscus
tea, a river, a handful of
shampoo falling to a drain
like melting snow drifts.
First grade, the Mexican anthem,
the snap of the flag,
chalk dust sneezes,
smell of library paste.
Village church.
Incense.
The crack of unopened Bibles
freeing their musk.
Laundry day,
the boiling.
Tamale day,
and the aunts with their
crow-voice laughter,
the meat, the masa, the
raisins, the cinnamon.
Morning glory
vines all tangled
through cheap Tijuana
perfume.
• • •
Just an illegal drudge
in crepuscular rain.
If you see her, protect her.
Revere her.
My unknown sister.
Light candles in her honor, you travelers.
She is the mother of my race.
Siege Communiqué
In Tijuana
they said Juárez
was the pueblo where old
whores went to die, where
25 cents bought flesh
by the river, no
body loved you, Sister—
so close to Texas
so far from
Revolución.
Today, they say
you are the cementerio
of hope: the only crop
in your garden of Río
Grande mud is bullets,
is machetes, is
acid baths for bones,
choruses of prayers
from those in torture church.
Hermanita of Perpetual
Sorrow, what flowers
do we hand you—we
who
die now too.
We who dangle nude
and burned from bridges,
we who hoped
to see our daughters
run through sunlight, only
chased by waves
not bleeding
yet,
but laughing.
Arizona Lamentation
We were happy here before they came.
This was always Odin’s garden,
A clean white place.
Cradle of Saxons,
Home harbor of the Norsemen.
No Mexican was ever born
In our land.
Then their envy, their racial hatred
Made us build a border fence
To protect our children.
But they kept coming.
There were never any Apaches here—
We never saw these Navajos, these Papagos,
These Yaquis. It’s a lie we cut from
Their history books.
• • •
But their wagons kept coming and coming.
And their soldiers.
We worshipped the god’s great tree,
But he forsook us.
We had something grand here
We had family values, we had clean sidewalks.
Then these strangers came. These mudmen.
They invaded our dream
And colored it.
Sombra
Mi cara
en la orilla
de tu pelvis
Yo
hincado
a tus pies:
suplicante
alabando
A tu olor
de mar, manzana,
margarita
Un minuto, nada más
Tú
ahora
tan delgada en mi memoria
como estas telarañas
de tinta.
Typewriter
we were poor enough
big deal
everybody
was poor
and we
among them
mom
watched me scrawl
poems
on butcher paper, notebook
drawing tracing
paper.
went
into the garage, dug
through boxes for her
WWII
typewriter.
it came in a beat box
w/ rusty hinges, had a black
and red ribbon tattered, some letters
came out two-toned, half red & half black—
that was all right with me:
it looked
like the words were burning:
fire above,
night below.
banging away in the kitchen, ratta
tatta like crazy hail
on a tin roof.
naked girls lived in my typewriter.
I pried ink clots
from the mouth of the O,
from the Q, the % and the B.
at night on our phone
I whispered my poems
to Becky
who cried into her pillow
all the way
across town.
I had a book by Stephen Crane,
so I clacked out second hand
Stephen Crane. Richard
Brautigan wrote really short poems,
so I beat out Brautigans.
then I read Jim Morrison’s book
& locked myself
in the bathroom, bellowed
second rate Morrison.
a $4.95 Bukowski.
a $1.98 Wakoski.
I hammered my way
through second hand books.
it was beautiful.
all of America, which I had yet to see,
lived in my typewriter. then China.
then Argentina. then Chile. then
Japan.
mom
sewed my manuscripts together,
kitchen books:
I was the most famous
author in my
dining room.
grime
slowed the keys—the R
stuck, the—
wouldn’t go
over the N.
then
one day,
trying to help,
mom
oiled the machine.
poured
cooking oil
into it—Wesson
in its dirty heart.
freezing the O.
Q was paralyzed.
the % fainted, the B
was in a coma.
words dusted over
and died.
Becky moved away from my typewriter.
oh well,
it was only fun, anyway, only
a goof.
every morning
I’d walk a mile
and a bit
through California fog
to my silent school.
I only cried once.
Skunks
For Rane Arroyo
Only the cats
had that much trouble
sleeping.
3:00 a.m.,
I’d be out there
in the yard,
naked where
thank God nobody
could see me,
under the crooked pine
our unhappy family once
brought home in a coffee
can, living Christmas
tree, planted
when I was a kid
now taller
than the house. Alive
with ants.
• • •
Again. Awake.
An owl, old midnight cliché,
on the tv antenna
like a fat devil
hooted: who, who
who: and I, that
other cliché,
answered: me, me
me. Both of us
bored beyond sleep
by Orion
doing his slow
handstands
toward dawn.
I loved a California
Christian girl
from Maranatha night
in one of those abomination
churches the size
and shape of a nuclear reactor
or a shopping mall:
Surfers there
slain in the spirit
spoke in Tongues—
dudes cried out their
improvised Hebrew:
AAMRALLAH! SAMBALLAH! SOODAYA! OH ELOHIM!
ALHAMBRA BRUSCHETTA HAHAHAHAHA! SELAH!
Prophesying in the name
of the Lord:
O MY PEOPLE
DO NOT
BE BUMMED
for Christ
was not no
bummer.
She smelled
like soap and
wildflower shampoo and
fruit gum and
Marlboros,
Praise God, and
she kissed me a
couple of times
so sweet we
lost our footing
and fell into her open
car trunk
where she’d hid
the Southern Comfort
and Coke
and, Can Somebody Say Amen,
when I wrote her love poems
she went to my best
bro’s apartment—
Can I Get A Witness—
and wrote that third
cliché and straddled him,
pumped him
all afternoon.
Let Us Give The Lord
A Mighty Hand of Praise.
I took this book
of poems I was writing her
and shook gas
from the mower on it
lit it
watched it burn.
The owl watched.
The cats came out
an
d watched.
I took the charcoal
corpse and a hammer
and crucified it
over my bed
so I would not sleep easy
on false prophecy
and the testimony
of sweet mouths
with the gift of tongue.
And skunks
came up from the canyons,
from their trashcan
graveyard shifts,
squeezed through
the fence: a mother
and six kits. They stole my catfood,
they brushed my naked legs
with their featherduster tails,
they walked the circle
of the yard with me from jade
tree to geranium, from honeysuckle
into the cosmos.
Skunks
have always been
my friends.
Went inside at 5:00,
rolled a fresh
sheet into
the machine,
spooned instant
into a cup,
put my pale ass
in a chair
and wrote a memo
to myself
since I was awake
anyway:
Item A) get over it.
Item B) keep typing.
Fall Rain
I paint myself in your sweat.
The blade of my hand peels
Heat from your breasts.
Your heartbeat moves
My blood along the branches
Of my wrists.
Under midnight’s slate
Can you tip this gray away?