Poetry

After your birthday dinner, you said life
didn’t turn out the way you wanted.
Then, who wanted the way it turned out?
If no one, why did it turn out that way?
I wanted a son, summers in a fishermen’s
village, and an endless book where seagulls
would dispute the catch of memories…

The cow pasture flooded and froze.
Over its milk glass rink, two crows
   drift to a pine,

catch like origami paper. Leafless
oak veins steam: auras lift
   an opaline

There’s nothing new under the Golden Star. If you did not exist
in my space/time coordinates, I would have invented you, spirited
from that Sunday afternoon in the Zócalo when you sang
your poems and I caught you afterwards at the lip of the stage

My son’s hands hid his face,
and his narrow shoulders shook
with sobbing. He had no metaphysics

yet, so the pastor’s voice bleated
senselessly over the grave
of his grandmother

All spring, I fed myself double doses
of the prescription, half-doses of
antihistamines. Cut my fingernails into
short squares like I saw on the hands
of my sister’s newborn child.

Honey pours from my eyes
as the mustard dries under
the bandaid, poultice yellow —
a flake on skin. I think about
the time I ate the lemon, whole,
rind and pith, spitting the seeds
into a cup because
Patricia told me to.

they say—wetback      they say—beaner        they say—cockroach
or you open mouth     for feeding & tears     fall under calloused tongue.

O you signals spinning round the
world with our secrets in tow,
what lies below, what pleasures
go, what torn bits show?