Balloons and Boulders

What is crime, I ask.

What is punishable if unavoidable, you go.

Say the man is twenty-nine

or twenty-five, but looks moth-eaten,

cheeks as sawtoothed as cliffs.

Say he is six foot two.

Say he is car-less and comfortless

(and that explains his females, 

the appetites).

Say his arms have gone black,

intricate twists and helixes where 

needles have pricked and poked him.

Say his eyes are starved.

Say his eyes are illiterate,  his lungs rash.

From a window, I watch.

From a window, I count.

Seven cars in one afternoon.

A stream of them:  coming!  coming!

There are loud women who knock handsomely,

and men, groomed, silent as spiders, 

weaving caliche into stunning lace, 

their urges clutched to navels as another 

would wield cash.  This is the envelope of unloading: 

Allotments and the burden of a balloon 

as hulking as boulders.

Asphalt

I’m seven.   

Barefoot, my mother runs after Raul’s Ford.

Don’t leave me, babe!  

Don’t leave me!

At 33, she calls.  

Frantic.  Dying sounds

conveyed via cellphone.

She ran over my cat.

In the street, the cat is convulsing.

If I’m crying, perhaps he won’t

yell at me, she thinks.

I’m sure of it.

It’s worked with other men.

At 33, I leave my dinner

and lock myself in a room.

I’m twenty-one.  

Puke stains the tops of my feet.

I didn’t quite make it to the sink.

Don’t die on me, mijo.

Why are you gonna die on me!?

Haphazardly, I wipe the yellow

mush, enough of it, not to track

it to the bath.

At 3 a.m., I’ve parked crookedly.  

In the street, I am barefoot.

Enough tequila in me to set

her voice ablaze.

I’m five.

My father fights with my mother and 

leaves with my uncle.

Move, move! she insists.

I’m pushed aside.   Having

just waved goodbye to them, my hand

goes through the rip in the grey screen.

Why don’t you just fuck him, too!

She yells, and the neighbors duck their

heads out trailer doors and 

manufactured screenless windows.

His truck speeds off, and she’s left

huffing the dust.

Such heaps of asphalt to rub away.

Sweeping after Having Remembered Mi Abuela 

i.

At the sink, the talavera

has clanked, broken water, and

chipped so that I must hide it, while 

noiselessly, you sit,

paint splat across an elbow, the

10 o’clock news rattling on and on

about armed robbery and wrecks-- 

the pit bull curled like a

rattlesnake at your boot.  

ii.

There was a time when

we were in Mexico, and I’d packed

our plates and the bowls I 

promised to purchase each trip we

made;  when we moved to

this house I never wanted,

these plates stayed put away,

same newsprint wrapping, 

same cardboard box, 

same thing that happened, 

I sometimes fear, 

to the knuckles we once called my heart.

iii.

In the bed, you sleep.  The dogs

snore and sigh.  A pillow

covering your face from the 

whisk of the broom I run over the

hickory floors you laid last winter.  

Te vas a casar con una viuda.  

You will marry a widow, I recall my Indian

abuela stutter as she pushed

a bundle of yellow straw 

over my unprotected feet 

when she would come to the States

to visit us and get money

for those of us who stayed behind.

Ironically, it is you who married

the widower.