so much.
Didn’t know I loved the peach parts
of sky, like soft sighs in the
morning air.
Or the smell of roasted peanuts,
how it gets caught in the back of
my throat.
Didn’t know I loved
windows giving back a
mirror when lit
with more sky, more sky
in every eye. I didn’t know
I loved trees, all five of them
on this block, waving
leaves
like greenfingers.
I remember hiding
under one’s shade while
papi stuffed a brown
bundle down my jeans &
kissed me on the forehead before
I ran to make his deliveries.
I didn’t know I loved the
wind, how cool it feels against
my skin, pushing me when I run,
always running. I
didn’t know I loved taxis.
God bless this girl, her easy
twenties. I didn’t know I loved
my own room,
Mickey Mouse frames,
Puerto Rico flag, my
shirts, towels, torn, but mine.
Didn’t know I loved her
feet, toes curling climbing me as
if I were a tree. Didn’t know I loved
her hands, so small, we touch
to make a prayer.
My palms swallow hers,
tiny, beautiful hands
how soft, they touch
the sides of my face,
my temples, my twin peaks, my eyelids,
as if my face is a
loved thing. I close
my eyes so she
won’t see ~
she kisses
my eyelids, undoes
each shirt button like a wish
and I let go, let her
keep opening,
undressing,
undoing
me
Until the day breaks
and the shadows flee,
turn, my beloved,
and be like a gazelle
or like a young stag
on the rugged hills.
~ Song of Songs
IV.
Invierno
Winter
“Turn your eyes from me, they overwhelm me,” lover,
you, who once drank from my heart’s cup of water,
we’re both parched now. Sere & spent.
Tired trees bent, God, how fast the years went
like a sad movie you rewind again &
again to make sense of the chaos & the tragic end…
But unlike the trusty Romeo & Juliet,
our heroes don’t commit suicide or surrender just yet
(though Hannah cries over her barren
insides and her fallen Angel, she still tries
to remember the words of Nina Simone’s
man-cry — “I gotta lotta livin’ to do before I die —
but you just do what you gotta do, my wild sweet
love…” for Self, for Life, for Ancestors above — )
Dear Audience, the sad truth is: Time passes
too fast but You, yes, You — Live and Love to the last.
Warm
Late November, they wait for the J train
on the swaying platform. Iron
poles shiver and stars glint like mica.
Angel’s boot cracks a vein into a sheet of iced rain.
He shoulders a sharp-toothed wind
while coats shuffle into Al’s Liquor
Shop, a stray pit barks, and his mother
lies limp in a sickbed in Bushwick.
I’m cold, Hannah says. Angel bends down,
blows breath into her palms. He kneads her fingers
and warms them in his cave-mouth.
God, so gentle, she thinks,
how dark, how deep his eyes.
Snow falls like white stars into his curls.
Crooked
After she bails Angel out, Hannah finds out he’s not home free.
Cops, they try to get him to give up the killer’s name,
but he’s no snitch. So they planted two bags of coke on me, ma
he says — and they’re threatening to put me away,
to lock me up in rehab, for not giving up my tío’s name.
He had scooped up the bullets to get rid of evidence
and got stuck with a wack deal — snitch on familia
and risk a bullet from Blaze in revenge, or cop a plea
& plead guilty to some shit he didn’t do.
Really, how can a street kid prove
NYPD cop corruption? Hannah fumes.
She drops thousands of dollars, every penny made
from her new paralegal job, on his criminal case,
hires a balding lawyer who slides his hand
down her thigh after one lunch meeting & says,
Why are you blowing all your money on this thug anyway?
Come, have dinner on me. My wife is fat. I’m lonely.
Disgusted, she leaves & sobs quietly on the 7 train
home, feeling far from grown & completely alone.
Heat
Tonight, with Bella’s busted tv spewing sick light
over her bed full of kids,
Hannah wants to rip open any face, spill
outside, tear the iron gate off, take flight —
take the kids and run. Or just run.
To Aibonito. Jejudo. Hell. Heaven.
Sitting there, watching sweet Maria dart, cackle, sniff
white lines above the toilet, she knows. She’s not Soldier enough,
not Nun enough, not Flint or Dove enough for a lifetime of
poverty. She knows her skin will fleck off like lead paint,
she’ll burn, tender-fleshed, the young ones; she’s like the unassuming
heater pole in the corner, all saint-
like, innocent, but inside, seething — deadly.
She shoves open the bathroom window, lets out steam.
Lions
She’s astounded that he can get coke planted on him,
be arrested and picked up while on his rollerblades
on his way to Central Park ~ how cops can be
so racist & corrupt, but it’s no surprise to him.
He sighs. She pounds her fists on pillows as she practices tae kwon do.
That night, Hannah dreams that Angel is a golden~maned lion,
in a sparse valley with sunglassed hunters in squad cars. The valley
is full of starving, lithe, regal lions the color of midnight, ocean, fire, gold.
And the hunters are armed with rifles,
and packs of white baggies that they plant on the hunted lions’ pelts,
saying, This one was wild, Sarge, on drugs. Run, she tells him, run!
She’s a voice in da wind. Through a haze,
she sees zoos ~ filled with lions, who turn into snarling inmates.
She sees how captivity makes
regal souls calm, trapped souls crazed.
Run, she says, run, young lions!, as she stirs & wakes.
Moonlight
Even with thick-soled Timbs, Angel treads slow over Jerome’s
black ice, careful not to twist his an
kle on his way home to Alma,
plate of arroz con pollo balanced on his palm. But three hooded men bump him
in their hustle to Highland Park. Chicken meat slips off bone;
rice & beans scatter like orange vomit into snow.
Angel’s alone, fuming. He rubs open the box cutter in his pocket,
thin breaths coming hard, fast. They eye him;
loom like one huge shadow on concrete.
A three-headed demon. What? You got beef?
The fat one sneers —
moonlight fills the gash in his
boar-neck. Shorty grips the muzzle of a handgun.
Angel backs off, stunned.
Is it moonlight in his eyes, or tears?
Shine (Angel)
she’s my shine…
in my dreams she’s always walking away, into the arms
of somebody richer, whiter, smarter, better.
but I can’t let her —
she’s mine.
with her, I can let go of all this
shit — uncurl my hand from a fist
to a hand that moves quiet as a whisper.
when I lie down with
her at night under
sheets, it’s my safest place — I lay down all
guns — I swear
there’s nowhere else I want to be.
just here.
streetlight blue on her black hair.
nothing like her, anywhere.
Hart Street
Angel loves this hushed pocket of night,
after his boys drift into sea,
after customers sniff and shuffle away
with a fistful of his two-bit white magic,
when window lights switch off one by one
like blown-out candles or stars,
when he’s alone on the corner of Hart,
under Jaquelina’s Christmas bulbs
half-golden in dusky hues,
air cool against his eyelids, he walks in half-
circles, does a two-step, sings dancehall reggae in
a high falsetto alone to his skinny self…
he lights a Newport, stares down the street —
it burns a blue line into infinity.
Chesa
Outside, a bloodorange moon
spills grief over Bushwick’s battered brownstones.
Same moon Hannah’s mother studies on her porch
before unscrewing jars, preparing meat, & rosewood plates for an early morning chesa ~
seaweed soup, pared apples, rice, incense for ancestors to inhale.
On this ripe harvest night, her father buttons up the Brooks Brothers suit
(he has no occasion to wear it except for funerals), to bow three times in the gray
dawn, circle smoke with a silver cup of water, inviting ancestors to drink.
She wonders now, staring at a cold, moonlit city, Would they claim me as
their own? Or am I completely alone? Where will I go when it’s my time to go?
To a blue graceland in the sky? Will I fly home to my uma’s land?
Will they greet me when I arrive?
She feels she could die or disappear, and no one
would notice, except the moon, a bloodshot yellow eye.
Cuban Link
When his mother dies, Angel clings to Hannah like seaweed,
even pulls her in the death-limo with his closest family.
He pawns his prized Cuban link necklace on Wanda’s staircase
to lace Hannah’s wrist with a ruby bracelet.
She takes off work for two weeks, sleeps
at his cousin Sady’s. He collapses in Hannah’s lap
in the back of the Q16 bus. One night in November,
letting guards down like cheap slips, she asks
him how many times he’s cheated. They’re sixteen.
His lips set in a grim line, he says,
Yo, don’t ask that question.
She leaves. He chases her barefoot and shirtless
down Jamaica Avenue. She throws off his bracelet:
it stays lost in a gutter, a soft red glint.
Water (Hannah)
(hold me, please)
We’re down to the marrow.
I kneel in the narrow
tub in front of Angel;
he lays limp — a broken
toy soldier, thin arms
battered by hot,
slashing water, down his stomach
in rivulets. I don’t know
how it feels to lose a mother,
anyone so close to kin.
All I know…is how to slow
this fall of water,
open my arms. Let him in.
Funeral Home
Why Hannah loves Angel is never more clear:
Flaco, Alma’s last husband,
who stole Angel’s Pepe jeans & new Sony camera
last time he was home, who left opened beers
piss-rank in the sink, who left Angel’s mother a baby with HIV,
now lurks outside of Saint Bartholomew’s funeral home, lupine,
ghost-eyed under lamplight. A crowd of home-
boys and homegirls from Hart flock close to see
Angel lose it — fists, blood, a midnight brawl.
The air is knife-thick. She can hardly catch her breath.
Angel, stock-still, walks towards him slow.
Stops. His lips twist.
He lets loose a cry. Hugs Flaco tight.
They sob into each other’s thick wool coats.
Rain
He’s standing in the rain, she’s crying by her door.
Early December. Japanese maple leaves stain the
wet gravel red. A sharp pain
cleaves her rib cage like a switchblade. The cheap floor
of her apartment is soaked. God, no more
mornings listening to the express trains
hurtle by, watching amber light wane
in seawaves on his back. A cheap whore
in a Mets T-shirt, she imagines herself through
his eyes. But what does she know?
He’s soaked to bone; his collarbones store
pools of rain. He tries to sear a true
memory of her into him — Indigo. Broken. Aglow.
He’s standing in the rain. She’s crying by her door.
Angel’s Rehab Suitcase
Guess jeans,
two Polo sweaters,
Hannah’s folded letter,
Bic shaving cream,
five pairs of white socks,
Fruit of the Loom long johns,
black velour tracksuit by Sean John,
beeswax for his new dreadlocks,
five plain white tees,
two do-rags, one Goofy tie,
E-Z rolling paper for trees,
four cotton boxers (one fly
silk pair), one necklace of cowrie
shells, one scrap of blue sky.
Rehab
A scrape of metal chair on tile.
Sign-in. The portly counselor,
Mr. Wilkins, who prods your old
lover to sit up straight for your visit while
scribbling notes on a pad —
he doesn’t know anything. Anything.
When he leaves the drab office, Angel clasps your
fingers in his dry hands. You hate rehab.
Its cigarette death-air. His stubble. Torn T-shirt.
Hair thinning to peaks on his forehead.
His eyes, shadows of his young eyes.
How they search you, hurt.
You gaze up at his bare temples instead,
afraid to stare back with less. Or with a lie.
Guilt
Try as she might, she can’t envision
a future with him beyond Bushwick —
tethered with children, yoked by familia,
she cannot wait the eternity of Angel’s sentence
while she’s still in the full bloom of womanhood.
Guilt chews her insides, but she can
no longer hide from herself the truth
of their unraveling, how her love for him has
become stained by all the grit & grime, dimmed
by their troubled, turbulent time together.
She stays awake, sleepless all night,
trying to decide her future ~
to let go ~ go for her own freedom,
or cling on to his sinking boat.
Countryless
Ay, they were two children lost
under the merciless glare of city lights.
A Corean and Boricua, diaspora kids,
brave enough to ride
underground trains like metallic waves,
just to catch da electric surge of a hug
from a budding red ~ gold love…
Throbbing. Hot. Burning.
When she met him, she felt the loneliness
in him call out to the loneliness in her.
If her pain folded up
like a tight virgin rose, his pain
pulled her in like a gaping black hole.
Quiet, proud boy. His honey~brown eyes.
She sees them as two kids hand-holding over a glittering street,
lampposts arching overhead like acacia trees,
young ones in search of a thornless bed to sleep.
Seeds
Towards the end, her wishes for Angel grow
small and hard as a handful of dry sunflower seeds:
she prays he’ll get his GED…
his baby brother, Rafi, will grow
tall as a beanstalk…all
AZT cocktails sure as magic potions. She prays
Angel & Hannah Page 7