we’d pull and pull till the string broke,
neighbors would come and yell
but we weren’t after their iguanas.
I don’t like to eat iguanas like Mom.
I’m going to see my parents.
(¡I’m going to see my parents!)
On my last day of school, I’ll tell
only my closest friends I’m flying
to where people drink cold milk,
put strawberries in their cereal,
I’ll eat strawberries all the time
get so tall I’ll start playing basketball.
Abuelita Says Goodbye
Javiercito, you’re leaving me tomorrow
when our tortilla-and-milk breaths will whisper
te amo. When I’ll pray the sun won’t devour
your northbound steps. I’m giving you
this conch swallowed with this delta’s
waves and the sound of absorbing sand.
Hold it to your ear. I’m tired
of my children leaving. My love for you
shatters windows with birds. Javiercito,
let your shadow return, alone,
or with sons, but soon. Call me Mamá,
not Abuelita. All my children
learned the names of seasons
from songs. Tonight, leaves fall.
There’s no autumn here. When you mist
into tomorrow’s dawns, at the shore
of somewhere, listen to this conch.
Don’t lose me.
Let Me Try Again
I could bore you with the sunset, the way water tasted
after so many days without it,
the trees,
the breed of dogs, but I can’t say
there were forty people
when we found the ranch with the thin white man,
his dogs,
and his shotgun.
Until this 5 a.m. I couldn’t remember
there were only five,
or seven people —
We’d separated by the paloverdes.
We, meaning:
four people. Not forty.
The rest…
I don’t know.
They weren’t there
when the thin white man
let us drink from a hose
while pointing his shotgun.
In pocho Spanish he told us
si correr perros atacar.
If run dogs trained attack.
When La Migra arrived, an officer
who probably called himself Hispanic at best,
not Mejicano like we called him, said
buenas noches
and gave us pan dulce y chocolate.
Procedure says he should’ve taken us
back to the station,
checked our fingerprints,
etcétera.
He must’ve remembered his family
over the border,
or the border coming over them,
because he drove us to the border
and told us
next time, rest at least five days,
don’t trust anyone calling themselves coyotes,
bring more tortillas, sardines, Alhambra.
He knew we would try again
and again,
like everyone does.
Citizenship
it was clear they were hungry
with their carts empty the clothes inside their empty hands
they were hungry because their hands
were empty their hands in trashcans
the trashcans on the street
the asphalt street on the red dirt the dirt taxpayers pay for
up to that invisible line visible thick white paint
visible booths visible with the fence starting from the booths
booth road booth road booth road office building then the fence
fence fence fence
it started from a corner with an iron pole
always an iron pole at the beginning
those men those women could walk between booths
say hi to white or brown officers no problem
the problem I think were carts belts jackets
we didn’t have any
or maybe not the problem
our skin sunburned all of us spoke Spanish
we didn’t know how they had ended up that way
on that side
we didn’t know how we had ended up here
we didn’t know but we understood why they walk
the opposite direction to buy food on this side
this side we all know is hunger
San Francisco Bay and “Mt. Tam”
Every day there’s the bay, every day, every night, once, it was Estero de Jaltepec:
Kingdom of Sand: warm, coconut-sweet, not salt.
We jumped from the pier,
we jumped from mangroves when air was thick gold honey. We’d come up
and there it was, El Volcán de Chinchontepec:
Mountain of Breasts:
dormant, with a cornfield-skirt. Twenty years above the tropic, every day,
every night, there’s “Mt. Tam,” its Coast Miwok name
Tamalpais
shortened by gringos: foreign and invasive like pampas grass,
like eucalyptus, like every single white seed of dandelions.
Doctor’s Office First Week in This Country
it’s procedure to inspect
the ass of an immigrant kid
undress put this gown on
the doctor will be here soon
that first day after Sonoran Desert
I showered for hours when we got to parents’ apartment
Father showed me the way to turn the knob that first day
how things worked
I hadn’t seen him since I was one
I didn’t know him know him
this is how you make your pee-pee grow he said so it’s bigger so it’s
the biggest
he said sometime that first month or that first year
pull
pull I did
pull
do it now
you’re young
it will work he said
did anything happen the doctor asked in front of my parents
then alone
did anything happen along the way in Spanish
all of this in Spanish
starting with es procedimiento
this is how you get hot water
twist then pull
no
I’d never used a sponge
soap-bar and hand was enough back there next to a well
I’d never seen a “shower”
parents said it that way in English chá-uer
that first “shower”
my dirt drew a dark rim around the linoleum
you will hear from us next week
I came back for all the necessary shots
I grew up across the street from a clinic
every kid cried
I came back I got shot I didn’t cry
I kept turning the wrong knob
even after Dad showed me
then Mom showed me
then we showered together
to make me comfortable with my own body again
with theirs
with anyone’s
it burned that first time
my skin
hot water
nothing happened
it burned
I’m sure
seguro que
nada pasó
Vows
Ever since a brown girl wanted fifteen thousand from me
to marry her, I’ve vowed to not sign documents
to get a visa, then ask myself why
I’ve let that hurt me so much to never buy rings.
Amor, tell me to shut up, tell me none of that matters,
come watch the tide drain south
to where the house I left is lined with glass and barbwire.
When I call abuelos,
¡Ay no mijo! Someone else is dead. Then,
they ask about you. I’m four years older than them
when they got married, six years older
than my parents, always they ask when I’ll visit,
soon Abuelos, soon. What I mean is
I can never go back. Amor, know more than I love you
quite possibly I love that bay at low tide,
even possibly, mangrove roots with bright-orange crabs.
You can’t know what it’s like to have that place
disappear, those brown waves, those bright-orange crabs,
what I really mean when I say I can never go back
is I wish to lie next to you every morning,
where we dive headfirst to know
what it’s like to swim in the middle of love
and see each gull flee like clothes
bouncing off the wall to the carpet
we must pick clean like a beach, after hurricanes.
Nocturne
Tomorrow won’t be the same, each step
farther from the border. Gin and tonics.
Tequila grapefruits. I threw that black mug
at your face after gin, after tequila,
I’m sorry. I drank too much. I drink too much,
I know. It wasn’t me who threw it,
I said, but it was. I was four. I saw Mom
between Grandpa’s gun and Grandma.
I was four. He chased every single
one of his daughters with his machete
in the middle of the day, in the middle of the night,
I didn’t know what to do except climb
the water tower across the street
with Red Power Ranger. He’s chased us
to this country that trained him to stay quiet
when “his boss” put prisoners in black bags,
then pushed them from the truck, “for everyone to see
what happens to bad people here.” Gin,
straight up. Tequila shots. No one understands why
Abuelita never left him. It’s mid-June,
Venus and Mars the closest they’ve been
in 2,000 years, but I’ve never seen grandparents hug,
or hold hands. I make an excuse.
You kept rubbing your hands. When I turned six
Grandpa quit drinking. He stayed at home at night
but never talked to us. He didn’t like gin.
Didn’t like writers. Didn’t like leftists.
Everyone gone except one cousin. You’re not here.
Tomorrow, tan poco. These walls snore
like Grandpa’s slurred shouts. I thought
the border would take him. All my aunts,
my mom, thought so too. We’re all running
from the sun on his machete.
The moon on his gun.
Deportation Letter
for my cousin Julia Zetino
The words Notice to Appear flap like a monarch trapped in a puddle.
Translation: ten years in a cell cold enough to be named Hielera.
If not that, a plane with chains locked to her legs. My aunt swam across
the Río Bravo twice to see her second daughter born in Greenbrae.
¿Why can’t my sister come here? asks the one who speaks English.
The monarch’s beaten, but it won’t listen. Since nothing’s wasted,
it might get eaten, it will nourish ants already gathering.
It was a hill like this. I was tired. I couldn’t keep running and fell. If it wasn’t for
the women who went back to pick me up from the shore, I wouldn’t be here.
Somewhere along here there’s a bridge. A cactus-pear bridge, red
like: the dirtiest sunset, Gila monster hiding, leftover sardines in tin.
¿The hibiscus sprouting? ¿Bougainvillea? One daughter wakes
and sees them and the volcano, and fire flowers through her window.
She’s never seen the bridge her mom isn’t afraid of.
My aunt, twenty-five years selling pupusas near that pier, ten and counting
cleaning houses, baking bread, anything in Larkspur. Most people
in La Herradura haven’t seen their parents. Her daughter Julia, over there.
Here, her daughter Adriana takes the bus to school every day.
The first try we were already in that van and La Migra was chasing us. The driver
said he was going to stop, we should open the doors and run. There were a lot of trucks.
Sirens. Men through the speakers. I got to a bush and hid. One dog found me.
He didn’t bite. He just stood next to me till one gringo handcuffed me.
This beach, these hills, are pretty. It looks like La Puntilla, except it’s cold.
I wish Julia was here. Javier, take a picture of Adriana and me. I’ll send it to Julia.
It’s complicated. Mamá me dejaste, decí que vas a regresar, I said, at night
on that same bed you sleep in now. Same bed next to the window
from which you see the lemons, the custard apples, the bean fields,
then the volcano. I’m sorry none of us ever saw you draw butterflies
like we see Adriana draw them, with the caption: “the butterflies
were going to save the world from tornado. And did.”
Seeing Your Mother Again
If you could cup your ears against all I’ve said:
ants inside me, a disturbed mound. Mamá Pati,
those years you weren’t there I throw at fronds,
so I drink what I’ve been wanting. Your 24th birthday
I bought you a coconut and carved your name
because “women become cracked,” but no,
eventually they lick us, we open our eyes, drag ourselves
out of our shoeboxes. Tails down. Forgiveness
is a lizard squirming. Mamá Pati, feed it to me.
From your salt on my cheeks, I know
you read all my letters, machetes cutting husk.
Exiliados
for Monica Sok
We didn’t hold typhoons or tropics in our hands.
I didn’t reach across the table on our first date
at Cornelia Street Café. In my humid pockets,
my fists were old tennis balls thrown to the stray dog
of love bouncing toward the Hudson down
to South Ferry. We didn’t hold hands in that cold
October wind, but the waves witnessed our promise
to return to my cratered-deforested homeland,
and you to your parents’, sometime in the future.
Then, us in the subway at 2 a.m. Oh the things I dreamed:
a kiss to the back of your neck, collarbone, belly button, there —
to kneel and bow my head, then return to the mole
next to your lips and taste your latitude together.
Instead, I went home, you touched my cheek,
it was enough. I stood, remembering what it’s like
to stand on desert dirt wishing stars would fall
as rain, on that huge dark country ahead of me.
My country you don’t exist
you’re only a bad silhouette of mine
a word I believed from the enemy.
Roque Dalton
June 10, 1999
I.
first day inside a plane I sat by the window
like when I ride the bus
correction when I rode buses
below the border I sat by the window attention
to dogs under a mango
trash under parked cars
drunks passed out
I sat by plane window
same afternoon I crossed
desert the third time
was not nervous at white
people at terminal all those questions
&
nbsp; did not cry did not stop
looking out the window
for Statue of Liberty Golden
Gate Disneyland Miami
I.
we were lost and didn’t know which star
was north what was east west we all
dropped out of the van too soon to remember
someone said the sun rose east we circled
so much we had no maps and the guide we paid
twisted his ankle was slowing us down
Unaccompanied Page 4