One Poem

Winter Cold


It’s not that horrible after sex
conversation when we rationally agree
to get on with our pedantic,
insufferable, ridiculous lives or your boots
clamoring down the steps, the phone
not answered, or the letters written

in a moment to reveal our failure:
how we don’t notice a dandelion
once yellow dormant under snow,
or those birds, those tiny brown
smudges that do not
go South for winter. It’s Elizabeth

at a phone booth calling my mother
for some cash and a cab to a motel
where she will sit within four walls
on the edge of a bed hugging
a poodle. Then Beatrice
not willing to talk. Her sadness sunk

deep into plush wall-to-wall carpeting.
And again those walls, those white
walls that surround your father,
or is it my father, all of us
who need so much more. It’s justified
this feeling of pure terror.

One more time quiet falls white
on an asphalt road, on the hood of cars,
on the path toward my front door.


Note: I found this poem on my harddrive. I wrote it a long time ago in Michigan. It must have been February or March. It was snowing. It was cold.

Three Poems

Nicaraguan Woman



Lupe, Guadalupe, your birthday is today
and I don’t know if I can write this poem
or use your name or tell your story or simply rely
on telling our story, my side, my version
of a walk along the beach in San Francisco,
in July, in the summer, a summer of fog
and overcast skies that do not hold rain,
a continuous wet flow over cars, rooftops, eucalyptus
trees, flowers and asphalt. Over a sand dune
and down to the shoreline we walk
to where water slices into sand, sandcrabs, seagulls,
the seagulls resting on square of vacant beach,
the beach vacant on a mid-summer day.

Both of us a bit after forty, compañeras, and I
think I am like you. Una mujer Latina, una mujer
desplazada, a displaced woman, a bilingual woman.
At times I have considered taking on the term,
Nicaraguan Woman, that which you truly are,
but I am not, no matter how
much I want to belong, to tie in, to say this is
mi pasado. It’s not. I was born here. Having read
Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and closely
filtered Woody Gutheries’ “This Land is Your Land,”
I believe in the me, in the I, in the most resplendent,
sparkling individualistic pattering of the isolated heart
traversing New York, imagining blue bayous
and the St. Louis arch. Yo soy una gringa
in my appearance, in the way I walk, stand and breathe.

And you tell me your story between water flowing
in and out, carving the shore, the shore disappearing
into the sea. Your story one of near drowning,
in a t-shirt and borrowed shorts, you held on
to a rope, a rope on a slip of a boat rocking through
the Rio Grande to the other side, los Estados Unidos.

Then the heat and three days alongside el coyote
in a desert, jogging in-formation, a steady pace. Pills passed
out, one apple, and the nonstop pounding of your feet.
I ask questions: Did you sleep? Did you eat? Did you have water?
Where you hospitalized? And you reply, the pain
not evident, a simple matter of fact, natural,
so natural that I don’t understand. No, no, no, no.
There were fevers and a doctor at the free clinic,
you explain, antibiotics, and to your toenails
painted a pristine pink, nestled in the wet sand,
you smile and point: Son Americanos. Estos crecieron aquí.


San Francisco



My great-grandmother taught my mother to read using chalk
and a black slate in León where adobe brick
buildings are white-washed Spaniards

and history. We brought with us red and blue macaws, panthers,
and crocodiles. Tooling up and down
Dolores Street hills, my Papi rode

a bicycle delivering Lela's nacatamales. Back and forth
from a clock tower at the end of Market Street,
a renovated 1919 streetcar,

transplanted from Milan, works tourist dollars. Advertisements
from the late sixties posted behind
True View Plexi-glass. I can't read a word

of the European Italian glitz, deep blue of the Mediterranean
and a Coca-Cola, but there is a warm blanket
on a wooden bench and a leather

hand hook. Above a Cuban restaurant, where waiters serve
black bean hummus and chocolate croissants,
hangs the gay pride flag alongside

a Direct TV satellite dish. Gabby walks to school, Pokémon
cards in his pocket. Sanchez Street. I work
in the kitchen with my Lela. Mariposa Avenue,

Valencia Street, Camino Real, are added to masa. Homemade
tortillas puff into sweetness. I'm not
one third Irish, one half German

and two parts English with a little Cherokee thrown in,
but last night I couldn't translate the word “hinge”
on every door that opens and closes

to clouds beyond four walls. An old lady, perhaps Cambodian,
Vietnamese, Korean, something of her own,
hurries off the 31 Stockton while

my Tía Teresa double parks in front of the mercados on 24th street
para los quesos y los chiles in the backroom. One
whiff and the world is not so small.




Red Ants, Black Ants



An ant crawling through tattered books and files
hid under the shelf until I pinched it within
a thin white tissue. It didn't have wings, but
it could have been a termite preparing to bore
into wallboard and chew its way down
the foundation. How strange

the way one ant on a wall next to a nail
comes forth unknown. A harbinger of why
I hate black ants and why Abuelita preserved
the red ones in mason jars. I have trouble
mixing the Wild West with Managua, Nicaragua
1908. Managua had to be green, but the poverty

and isolation of dry desert mesquite, beans
bubbling in an iron pot, fit stories
of hunger. Everyone. My grandmother stole
into the kitchen wearing a white
cotton frock embroidered with pineapples.
It could have been pale blue or yellow.

Definitely sleeveless in that humidity
and heat. Clear night skies are not frozen cold,
but a time when aunts, uncles, cousins and
grandmothers dream without sound.
Iguanas and monkeys. Huge cockroaches
with wings. In the night, a crescent moon would

have been enough for her to reach into a box lined
with wax paper. An iron box. A spicy hunk
of meat in her little scavenging hands
and the ants. The red ants biting her tongue.
Why do we love our families so much?
I had a hammer and nails. A piece of plywood.

I was determined to pound straight and true
under a Los Angeles sun and Abuelita's tomatoes,
five pearly bushes six feet tall. Green in arid
desert heat. From the garden hose water
came out hot and splashed to dry dust. I sat
on clumps of grass, the board between my legs.

The nails wouldn't stay straight! They flopped
over as the hammer hit the head. It was hot
and I was sweaty, dirty and crying. Those damn
nails! And the ants crawling on my sneakers,
in my sock, up my leg! I'm sure she came out
and wiped me off; had me blow my nose

and gave me a piece of pie. It wasn't pie.
It was torta. Out of a mix, but changed. An extra
egg. Whole milk. Los Angeles. Managua.
Verdant green mangroves and tile roofs.