by Amalio Madueno
1
His mother was a green bouquet of kelp. She bore him over a period of three days down by the shipyard. The harbor was a flotsammed, jagged place for an alien kid to play. He ignored the many just like him trying to find a way to shallows, sandbars, and shoals. On the silver strand, he noticed how the shorebirds skimmed for succulent tips and spears as they cruised the crashing waves, the spreading spume and foam.
Tortillas
I
God is a kilo of steaming tortillas that does nothing
but make a sphere of aroma .
I’ve studied the ancestry of corn, sought out the madre
de maiz, chewed the juice of teosinte.
It is on no page in any tome,
finds no place on any page
Given this reality the princessas, the jovenitas,
the viejitas churning out,
Patting out, cranking tortillas forever look
very important, very serious.
No Ave Marias prayed to heaven solve the mystery,
Save me from tilling rows,
Hauling water, squashing the worms, spraying
the fungus, driving the dusty
Afternoons of August wildly to the horizon.
Winters I’ve often thought of sacrificing to the goddess,
But could not hold the thought of her pure being long enough.
Forever young, fertile girl with silky hair.
Se’s there. The corn & I follow her commands . . .
I will go as far as I can believing these things.
II
I unfold the wrapping and think:
I’ve eaten more tortillas than anyone I know
Hot cold rolled flat fried steamed flamed burnt
Plain or with butter balony salami tuna
peanut butter salsa guacamole
Walking out of the tortillaria in Tijuana
Put your nose to the wrapping paper
Forget the corn shortage, the field where it grows
October corn November corn December corn
Steamy tortillerias con 2-ton maquinas @ 1,000 btu.
Streams of tortillas at 100 per minute
What do they cost a penny or two?
III
In a festive plaza humming with music I dance
In my tortilla suit I dance and dance. It’s a special day,
A feast day with abundance and variety, a celebration
For a single goddess moving amongst the crowd.
The only hint of her presence -- corn silk here and there
Glistening in the sunlit breeze, in this dance
Where sun, mountain, river and goddess are one.
A tetradic deity I must honor in careful movements
Timed to meet each drumbeat in midair.
Each movement: hand, arm, head, bonnet, mask
Can only be understood in four ways, every minute,
Every hour all day for all to witness and understand.
At sunset I lie down surrounded by leaves
And watch the stars appear one by one with her.
Kernels of light awaiting the moon to devour them.
Freedom of the Press
Early morning hours and Robert Mora García,
Editor of El Mañana, is muerto outside mi casa,
Police radio-crackle surrounds me
As I watch his oozing wounds and remember
Shots outside my dawn-blue windows.
Mi casa es su casa. The phrase sinks down,
Weighted with what I’ve seen. Who will say
Along with me, “mis casa es su casa”?
Who will smooth his dusty hair?
There isn’t much the madrugada patrol
Can do, in any case. Mora, dead outside
With nothing left to write about,
As the day grows, as the wounds ooze,
There is this much else to add
Shuffling noises, radio-crackle, mixed
mañana sounds, clustered, clotted, A wallet
With 20 pesos ($2 U.S.) lying there
Cell phone in his pantalones ringing
La Cucaracha, ringing, tatata-Ta-TA!
Keys in the ignition, driver door open
window rolled down . . .
Outside his casa, mi casa, all morning
Clouds have been sliding out of the Gulf
All night dust stirred in the paseo, shifting
Its weight, and now the day begins to sear.
Tiny points of heat pierce even
The deepest patios of mi casa, su casa.
2
She becomes dizzy at the sight of orchids. Her sons turn pale at the sight of their own juice. La reina telectronica cannot control the vibrations she gets from border patrol officers. All her ancestors can drink a pint of cahuama blood at one sitting. They keep a pot of menudo simmering all night, every night, chopping cebolla & cilantro, crushing red chile, flipping giant tortillas on fired-up 50 gallon drums. The traffic roars. A trogon talks convincingly to her from deep in the arroyo. Eventually, she no longer wakes up trailing dreams of the bosque.
Toxic Waste
The reason for toxicity in the lagoon
Is a double chain chemical compound,
A form of viscous liquid similar to burned oil
400 barrels in our own front yard
Immersed and sealed in cement and somebody
Found it and somebody touched it and now we’re all hurting
I would rather raise a victory cry celebrating
The end of construction -- a day so happy the mist
Lifts from the lagoon with hummingbirds
And there is nothing in the world I covet,
And all the injury I have known is gone
And knowing it has taken so long to be certain of some
Small important things about the world does not pain me,
And in this landscape I feel completely at home
While I dive headfirst with arms outstretched.
3
She often got lost somewhere in the chapparal. Her father would find her entwined in pungent chamisal. She would get lost again and again deep in Arroyo Seco… on purpose. On moonlit nights she filled her pockets with balls from the far end of the driving range. Sometimes she was home watching the clock, turning the channel, flipping the page. Other times, she sat at the base of a cedar cracking piñon with her white front teeth. While she followed her father delivering mail, whistling along infinite pavements, a striped blue lizard looked for her in the underbrush, flicking his speedy tongue in every corner.
4
La Tiendita is a tiny store out in the flats specializing in eggs and beer and such. Garcia goes around with a feather duster, fly swatter, and goggles. Taz! Taz! No flyspecks on the Tecate! Get away from my blanquillas! No brats near the Cuervo miniatures! Painted mouse skulls dangle from the walk-in fridge. A large mosca plops on a pearly egg. G makes a grimace and his lips clench. On his head he wears a fake deer head with tiny antlers tied on with scarlet ribbon.
Cruiser
Cruise, niño, cruise,
Francisco Javier Reza Pacheco’s
Juárez Cruiser Crackdown
impounded eighty cars mijo,
y quien s’ai bruised bodies
Reza Pacheco detects & fines
cruisers drag & race,
watchale niño for Pacheco!
adults caught seep and bleed
serve 36 hours, mijo!
18 or younger al Systema
with bandages, major injuries
and minor tickets mijo
wachale! under over around
city street rehab,
Under & around Pacheco’s
funny face, cruise, mijo, cruise!
Hourly Wages
All I want is flexible hours
dynamic, bilingual bendable hours
individual hours queued for miles
into the desert emerging Hispano
Euro market hours Mexican
hours in any language hours
joined to mine with infinite filaments
support hours intoned in spanish
& french hours & hours of independence
ability hours buzzing & fluttering
position hours available now
offering hours competing for attention
benefit hours langorous & yearning
flexible hours, immensely flexible
bending and turning for me
5
Garcia pressing her hotly with his oiled and decorated fingers. She slips one hand around him as if he were a child that needed urging. The moan she uses is like the single note in his blood, but the timbre is hers entirely. “You might give me greater pleasure with a different approach,” she opines. She’s right, he thinks. Always, since he’s been sinking in her steam, there has been this quarking certainty. His chilly room has been known to disappear entirely in vaporous night.
Agriculture
Everyone wants a part of me.
Its making me a loco!
There’s the chileros from el Norte,
then the chileros from el Sur,
the hermanos y hermanas,
the padres from Sierra Tarahumara
brought by international programs,
the meztizos and gente indigena who
have no clue what they are in for . . .
It’s the americanos, tonto!
Here to take you from yourselves!
Corn kilos, sheep, goats, chickens
cattlemen dumping clean herds,
30 meters of federal Red Tape
Innocuous sub-frozen inoculum
for Fed verification studies,
Y, an FDA guy with a food label law . . .
like I says: meat quality and
diet and stress and pork . . .
gee does my life count?
Lengua brings it all together...
do you know where El Rincon is?
yes its down the street, at the corner!
Great name for a bar, que no?
6
Granpo was so rich he never paid for anything. All alone on Black Mesa in his half-pipe Silverstream, he would drink gin and eat candy bars, waiting for the hookers to arrive. Y volver, volver, volver . . . G never heard him sing. Instead, there was mostly silence. His mother cut up the mink stole Granpo gave her to make him a Davy Crockett hat before she went out to commit grand larceny.
Desaparecidas
They disappear and then we find them
The reason the women of Júarez wear black
The reason for the gritos citations and web links
About 10 years and 400 women
Young sexual bodies autoridades dismiss
They disappear and then we find them
The reason mothers of the dead wear black
The reason for perpetual funeral marches
The reason they walk silent with black crosses
They disappear and then we find them
17 since August their mothers place candles
cards names dates they were killed
They disappear and then we find them
The reason for crucifixes spread before
The Palacio del Gobierno’s traffic and noise
17 per month in Buendia colonia
24 in Cuidad Centro 97 in four years.
They disappear and then we find them
Their last moments diaphanous facts
Adrift in papers and trash on Avenida Revolucion
They disappear and then we find them
7
Reina considers herself the first in a line of consultant warriors. It’s been no time at all since she put on her warrior socks and stalked into government offices to wreak havoc among the ignorantes. The roads are lined with the charred hulks of those who did not heed her counsel. The Cyclopean forest ranger wants to achieve sustainable biomass, and R has nothing to suggest to him. “The bosquistas are claiming Truchas y Vallecitos!” R declaims in La Mesilla. “The Tejanos are yodeling still about all that timber they bought, their humvees crashing through the forest flora!”
In a brief respite, she neatly places chunks of copal in a ceremonial brazier and inhales thick wisps of smoke through her large nostrils.
Trucking
The first bug of Spring hit the windshield
And the horizon out past the Chiricahuas
Was a pale slice of watermelon
I had a truck full of flagstone
Dug from a road cut near el sanctuario
And I was happy-tired looking forward
To some downtime when I felt it
Like I was driving through a new world
Without having left the old, then
Some lightning touched the ground out west
While the engine ate up the miles heading south
8
It was the fifties – the time of the Great Assimilation. Some evenings she understood how everyone in the country had the same thought balloon floating above his head. She knew it was a form of thinking -- each balloon wavering on its tether, tinged with intimations of catastrophe, the velocity of extinction. “We would think incessantly,” she remembered, “breathless with conformity. Later, we’d comment on the lack of coherence, the way the certainty of the young was inspiring and frightening at once. In the morning there was cereal & milk while cocky disk jockeys massaged the airwaves. TV commercials blared at each housewife deaf behind her vacuum.”
Middle Spring
Below me and above, middle Spring.
Blossom air soothes gravel and stone.
Birds in my shaggy yard scamper in dust
At home in morning’s ocean breeze.
Night after night dreams become less
Familiar, like the landscape of a city
I will never see. Today is light,
Tomorrow will be lighter still. Sundogs
Streak the perihelion, spiders drop
Filaments of light out of the blue
Into sunny scrutiny – the intersection
Of the everyday.
9
Thirty years after the end of the season, he showed up. He had changed. No more football uniform, cleats worn to stipples, cobwebs in the earholes of his helmet. Bronze muscles no longer rippled under shiny spandex. He still carried the famous ball that penetrated any zone, but the laces were gone. Whatever the image, he held no frisson for us. “Hechale compañero!” we shouted as he faked and feinted his way up the alley.
Questions
The questions will be there in the morning
Holding on all night until the light returns
The word damage reaches mind, and I consider it
As I watch traffic snarl and smolder in the interchange.
All that tonnage sinking into pavement
Weighted with oils of ecstasy and sorrow.
No one will swerve, no one will lean on the horn,
Lay on the brights to catch a glimpse as they skid
By in the glare and confusion of dusk and rush hour.
Side-lit, flash-panned they spin away
Like pinballs wherever a void appears,
Fluid, jack-braking, multi-lingual in their own noise
All evening red lights slide toward the coast
All evening bright halogens burn holes
Through the canopy of decision. And now
They are upon us, specks of uncertainty streaming
In a bright rain right at us.
10
“You remember the story about me and the uppity white girl,” says Tia Lola. “It was the Depression; she goaded me about my new leather shoes.” ‘No wetback should have shoes like that in times like this!’ she told me. My father gave me a hatpin to defend myself. After our next encounter, she never came to school again.”
11
The desert was no longer alive. He crawled through a hole gnawed long ago by giant ants. The rising sun glinted on the stubble of catastrophe. “I imagine,” Garcia said, “how in a future time one might devolve to a form of agave azul tequilana, sending down roots to drink.”
How Old Am I
My memories fade like daybreak stars
One by one taken by the light
Once brilliant in mind’s dark
In the wide blue void not a hook
A line, or a sinker -- only a raven swooping
The ash heap, honking geese heading north
Ragged snow clouds on Gallegos Peak
Grip fading on a cherished bundle
Another drag and back to dreams
Running with the winds in another world
Forever fastened by filament and fetch
Wind scours gnarled roots
Portale echoes grind adobe and pine
Remember and mind and remember
12
GARCIA APPEARS NIGHTLY:
Out back of The Void--A Wood-Fired Pizzeria
Wilted lechuga in a white plastic bucket
Under a clothesline draped with meat.
The Water
Always attracted to surface and horizon --
The deeper than here hemisphere’s blue.
Light shards boomerang, broken
From angled sun as I drift like a barge.
Moment to moment I become more liquid,
Flow with a current high to low,
Ending in the continental trench
Dusk splintered by water lights, pulls
Keening birds on amber lanes
Down to a rushing tide
13
The nopal is a succulent with attitude. Everything in it can be used for moistening. And something else, Garcia thinks: Your moisture or its moisture, what’s the difference? In the sizzling arroyo, your shadowy guts naturally quiet down, like a lizard under a rock.
The Crossing
The crossing roars like the shore in storm surf
It is high noon and desire, like a hawk, hovers
Over idling traffic. And it will swoop, believe me.
Up north the freeway begins its long exhalation.
Off ramps spool out to the horizon
High noon is bleeding all over the polished ocean
High noon folds the power poles into origami
High noon raises a dust up and blankets
The foothills with smog, desire wings its way
Through the hazy distance. Can we keep it
In sight? Can we call it back, give it a glove to find?
Or should we let it disappear in commercial flightpaths
Should we turn back to calculating our worth,
The value of our transactions? The passing through,
The collecting, the fee, the constant fee.
14
Reina Rosa’s shiny black hair is spiked fashionably, the more to signify her lust for life in the narrow hallways of the mundane. Bureaucrats call her la femme d’affaires but she pays them no heed. She keeps her eyes wide open. Her meek assistants turn their heads away when she speaks, sweating tiny beads. Garcia hears it all from one of her reputed lovers, a bearded old goat, well-hung, who insists he’s been doing her daily, discreetly, for years in her private rooms. “She still comes like an earthquake,” he says.
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