Selected Poetry
Love letters from along the US-Mexico border
The West of El Paso
To the Man with Canyon Eyes,
Thank you for loving me.
I would scale the Chisos mountains a thousand times,
Let my cheap shoes wear out, let my feet bleed,
Leave traces of myself everywhere—red Rorschach images left to you in the sands,
A messy map of menses and bruises,
So that you could meet me there, brave girl waving a white flag,
The peak is the end of an abandoned road that always leads the way towards
You
Are somewhere that I could hold onto without an audience,
So, look out into that final vestige of desiccated free space,
This massive plot of land where rainbows dance and the chapel doors are always open,
Ourselves wild; rattled with determination, all chattering teeth at an unseen altar,
But more than anything: young and double-knotted with yearning,
What a blessing it is to have known you,
To have willingly sauntered off the edge of your smile and into your dreaming eyes,
Inside of you without a map,
To the man with canyon eyes
T
h
a
n
k
Y
o
u
(For loving me.)
Orozco, with Ciudad de Mexico in His Hands
To the brown-eyed boy with the clay heart
And papel-maché bitterness,
Why was I such a bitch?
Took the baton to your bonbon belly
No blindfold necessary
Sweets wrapped in fools-gold spilled
I filled my pockets to the brink
And ate until my teeth would ache
I swallowed up those sweet, shining agonies
And tried to grow them in my stomach
Like a Child
Like the Lottería
Gas-station scratch-offs buying lubricant but not forgiveness
In the yard were still more candies we’d forgot
They melted in the grass,
To a dark syrup muck,
Molten molé to slip on or sink in
Staining our feet to blackness
The flies came, I guess, for the fudge
Buzzing in the heat
They entered the house after I left the lights on
Balmy night with the doors wide open
Sage burning on the altar
Burning like your text messages beyond the screen
Six page paragraphs sent for me to decode
Like some ancient Aztec scroll
We patched up that first break-up with plaster,
Papel-maché lover,
Plus, you bought me a plane ticket
On the way to Ciudad de México,
You promised you would teach me how to play
Devil’s advocate.
Wait, that’s not what it’s called!
I mean that funny grandparent’s game
No, no, not small-town chapel weddings, but
–Bingo!
Oh, look where my beans landed,
All on the Diablita, woman in the low cut dress,
With her red horns and sugar-scull smiles
The same one from the many pictures we took in the Zocalo
Me with my corpse painted face
All dressed up for our first Día de Los Muertos
The great murals of Orozco, Rivera, Posada descending
Bold colors, broad strokes, depicting brown hands and corn husks,
A reminiscence of both our Mexican Madres
Interrupted only by the occasional graffiti, an anarchists scribble:
Desobedece
Six months passed before the my Diablita began whispering to me again
Angry and hopeful sexpot on my shoulder,
She won
And I left him for the living boat, but I called him in a dream
Dial d-i-s-g-u-s-t after the beep,
or leave a message at the tone
I said: Darling stay a while, stay, stay
My voice was far away to him
Who was sitting in a bucolic field
Needle and thread between his fingertips,
Cell-phone at his pristine toes
He was stitching himself back together,
Wet mud-heart still beating, somehow, still
His response: Do not grovel, Woman
En la boca cerrada no entran moscas
His words a stake to the heart.
"My hands are my heart."
Bones of my desire in the backyard
Beneath the fig tree
Like some artifact
Left for the excavation of Future Self
She will find I've cleared the mess,
Beneath the branches she will see it,
Surely we did not etch our initials
With a pocket knife
She will dig up the bones
Study them beyond the lens of a microscope
And recover, reclassify, reassemble
For a big, dead-dinosaur-type display,
The kind I loved as a kid,
Let the skeleton float overhead,
Let it swim beneath the urbanity,
Between the towering stacks of glass and metal,
of sky-scrapers and big-city book-shelves
Not so unlike that massive, post-modernist sculpture
The one at the Biblioteca Vasconcelos, the rare whale who had washed up from the sea
Who was conserved by an artist’s hands
But these bones are their own political statement, their own idea, their own agony, their own love
Something to scare the children, or at least, the single-minded,
Something smiling under the bed and between the sheets
Calaveras Queen, hung from the rafters for her brujería
Immortalized, never extinct