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III
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LOBE
We lie in bed when she tells me she is pregnant. I imagine a body, tender and small, the lobe of an ear floating in her belly. Already, I am eager to whisper a name.
Ángel, she says, I’m not ready to have a baby. I rise and sit on the edge of our bed, cover my face with my hands. Still, a part of me believes a man shouldn’t cry in front of a woman, even in the dark.
She sits beside me and searches for my face. Gently, she peels my hands away, finger after finger. She places her hands in mine. Our small embrace, warm, wet, and empty.
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ASH
Children who know nothing of snow
dig in their thin pockets for change
to ask the woman pushing a shopping cart
for a raspado: her raspador scraping over
a block of ice, the already-melting mound
pushed into the mouth of a Styrofoam cup,
each crystal as white as the clouds passing
above. When they sit on the stoop to slurp
the sweetness their lips reveal everything
about want: limes hanging from a backyard
limb, strawberries bleeding on the kitchen
table, the blue of the stringy sky—nothing
is as it seems. Today, the sky is filled with
soot and most of California is burning. What
falls from the sky and piles onto the parked
cars is something like snow. Only there are
no children outside to roll snowmen, to lie
down on the lawn, coats growing wet as they
form angels, to pack snowballs tightly into fists.
Everything quiet.
I sit on the porch beside my girlfriend
watching ash fall and cover the city in gray.
She has lived on this block all her life and has
never seen snow. The first time I saw it fall
I was only five, living in Texas. I begged
my mother to let me outside, and after
she wrapped me in coat after coat I went out.
I tell my girlfriend I did not play—convinced
snow was some kind of miracle— tell her
how I knelt down to carefully scoop several
handfuls of snow into my eager mouth, and how
my tongue, for the rest of the day, kept burning.
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EL ESPOSO DE LA LLORONA NEGOCIA
For years, I believed the myth. If not god,
at least the son of god. I am nothing, no one:
not water turned to wine turned to blood.
Only flesh. Only the marrow in my bones.
From the disintegrating temple of my body
I make this small offering for their resurrection:
Forgive me my sins.
Forgive me my sons.
Take me, instead.
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BLOOD
I was eleven the first time I saw a girl bleed.
Between the boy’s restroom and a storage bungalow,
we watched, in rapture, two girls begin to beat
one another. A single drop blossoming on a white
blouse. It didn’t stop. Soon, it spread across their
pants, spilled onto the concrete beneath them,
one girl, the smaller girl, beaten so badly she
could not fight back and instead—her blouse
ripped open—covered herself, one hand over
her breasts, the other clutched into the black hair
of the girl who would not stop—the hollow pop
of her fists against cheek. I swear, I could smell
it, like rust in the air and as I walked back across
the blacktop, I felt it. Slowly, my stomach turned.
At home, I locked myself in the bathroom to vomit,
afraid to feel what between my legs grew swollen.
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MEDITATIONS ON LEAVING
The first person to leave me
was my father. He took with him
my memories: hollow-boned
animals perched in his beard.
Flightless, in his back pocket,
the butterfly knife he gave me.
When you leave them, leave only what you can’t carry.
Beneath a mattress, stacked in the medicine cabinet,
on a note left in a book resting on a dust-covered shelf
leave your memories.
The first time I made my mother cry,
we sat at the dining room table. She
asked me to bring her a spoon. What
I brought was a joke: the largest one
I could find: serving size to imply how
much she ate. She left the room holding
her face in her moist hands. How hungry
she must have been for an apology.
Because I did not show remorse my
brothers beat me blue for what
I did not know: how easily
I could hurt the first woman I loved.
Think better days. Think early. Think Saturday mornings. Cartoons. Roadtrips. Salsipuedes. Your father driving sunny Sunday summer afternoons through a trail of red taillights. Not the coming or going, but being stuck in it. The long goodbye. Think what you’d give for one more warm morning: the smell of your parents still in bed making
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