A Grave is Given Supper

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A Grave is Given Supper Page 2

by Mike Soto

it wasn’t really a dog, but a man

  back for revenge & unable to lure

  his adversary out of his home—say

  it wasn’t really a road, but a dream

  our imaginations paved. That’s why

  our slingshots veered left & we missed

  him every time. Explain the day

  we ducked supper for the .22 rifle,

  became hosts to the noiseless rabbits,

  how they arrived like thoughts into

  the grass we guarded, & came away

  with the bells of three bodies gripped

  in our hands, headed to the pines

  for a stew on branch-fire, the peppers

  Abuelita grew in a wheelbarrow

  the secret ingredient. A few spoons

  made us mummies trying to talk

  our bodies out of going blind,

  back & forth wiping our brows

  in an ecstatic hell of found time.

  Explain, but it won’t be enough

  for the dice-roll that told us which

  rooster to dub with a razor blade,

  how it took only a day to train it

  to blaze its feathers at turkeys,

  even the ones that attacked

  Tía when she wore skirts.

  So many days are tunnels. At the end

  of one, nets of sunlit water for bathing

  outside. Another leads to a flea market

  where all our money put together

  affords only one pair of boxing gloves,

  so we flip a bottle cap to decide who

  gets to fight with his right hand.

  The Dead Women

  The killers went to no trouble covering

  the bodies, no black plastic bags, no lids

  on barrels, knowing vultures would bury

  them in a lone cloud. Every day, women

  rouse out of sleep, sit up thousands

  in the blue-black light to catch

  hour-long buses in lots their bodies

  know by memory. By early morning

  plants hum with the gloved hands

  of women assembling screens all kinds

  & sizes, LED, LCD, plasma, touch

  for smartphones & tablets. Shantytowns

  leap into the desert to meet the demand.

  At the end of a long week golden arms

  dangle out of sport utility vehicles, men

  catcall in elaborate necklaces, step out

  & tap snakeskin boots to music no one

  will tell them is too loud. Women with

  their own money might smile, or refuse

  in the wrong manner. It’s absurd to say

  these were not murders of passion, but

  the media says the impossible. Imagine

  no bars over windows & doors, these

  neighborhoods with no layers of graffiti

  competing incessantly to stay king. A body

  appears along a highway, no one discusses it.

  Then a chicken farmer finds seventeen.

  It takes a number to shock people now.

  You might think a match cannot be struck

  on such a suffered surface, no one shouts,

  no one snaps, no one has had enough.

  Then a mother’s heart & mind go blank,

  screaming, attacking, accusing everyone in front

  of the station, the whole world, of murdering

  her youngest, a dancer who had no silicone

  implants coroners could use to identify her.

  Aluminum children run holding snakeskins up

  to every car that passes, shaking them like sleeves

  of shirts drivers keep leaving behind.

  Out of improvised holes, shanties cooked up

  with sticks & soda cans, out of roofs that invent

  rags of shade on the ground,

  they emerge ecstatic to announce their market:

  coyote pup, vulture fledgling, scorpions

  clicking in chicken-wire cages raised like lanterns,

  like a futile conjure they must attempt

  hundreds of times. Hard to know—belt or boot

  maker, medicine man—who ever stops to reward

  their cunning. On this road only a kettle of vultures

  stirs the bored stadium of survival.

  But the truth, once in a while, a black

  Bronco pulls over, with a rack of ibex

  horns as its hood ornament, with dice

  that dance from its rearview mirror above

  a dash plated with gold, & the eagerness

  of those children surrounds the opened door.

  They must have a name for the exotic boot

  that gravels the ground, maybe God is a man

  who comes every thousand cars, lets them

  recover their faces in his mirrored sunglasses.

  When the firing squad lines up, honey

  is what I hear, jars of it glowing

  in the sun, the buzzed lasso

  of bees hovering above the lids,

  a busker’s accordion …

  the vagabond who taught me staring

  was impolite takes out his teeth

  & smiles. Shipwrecks

  of rice, hanging scales weigh clouds

  of mulato pepper, a bag of pig’s feet—

  every sale shakes the dials

  from sleep … & past a parade of face masks,

  the backdoor of the pink corner store

  brightens to the scuffed yard where

  I set down my first rooster & watch it blaze

  its head feathers toward a house of cards.

  If I was born into vengeance, dragged

  into life to carry death across a battlefield

  that doesn’t exist. If I was born

  into these alleys butchers & vendors use—

  drain on the floor, hoses nearby

  humming with sandblasts of water—

  then the man with a desert scorpion ambered

  in his belt buckle has been in charge

  this whole time. When I hear another accordion

  join the busker, & the men raise up & point,

  the scorpion is the one who comes over

  to my ear & grins No,

  that’s the sound of Santísima Muerte pulling

  her drenched hair out of a bucket.

  Mercury Topaz

  Trapped in trying, caught in the cloth

  of my own dreaming, unable to wish myself

  free—somersault snatched in a pelican’s gullet,

  suffering to wake from a mumbled country

  the size of my sleep, with barely enough room

  for wanting out. How to know—as the flicker

  of a faceless start, unborn, uncoined, desperate

  to stay dead (or was it alive?)—why

  I was being smuggled in a box surrounded

  by the jive of tricksters—whose footsteps

  came so crisply after coming to a standstill

  the size of an ocean. How to predict

  a trunk would fly open, that I would be a man

  weeping blindly on a bleached floor

  of light, unable to decide if condemned or spared

  under the belly of a bridge, as models

  of other vehicles sped by. How to ever

  bring myself back—to the size of knowing,

  who drove, which voices were real.

  A few footprints & a coffee left steaming

  on the dash of the unlocked car.

  Laundry across Balconies or, Deciding to Fold

  The jellyfish tethered midair this morning,

  floating in the noised vaults between buildings,

  sent out sleeping across balconies, were proof

  this day arrived under a table of water

  to show us its cards. With a high inhuman

  kindness, in the wired space where clothes

  mean to dry, a voice began but only its solitude

/>   could be made out. Above the snare of sparked

  gardens, stray cats sipping a birdbath, a ceremony

  of drowned kites hovered, trying to age backward

  to the invention of flight. My mind made up

  by the birds that flickered away from the wire

  while those shirts reeled in the clockwork

  of the voice’s hands—the first few squeezed

  decide that nothing is ready to come in.

  Topito’s Yes

  The window cracks open, an ant travels

  the sunny side of an egg, & already

  the song at my heels is a trumpet

  snickering at death, a Yes

  played simply, resembling a blind

  man’s cane, or light tapping into

  the belly of a knife, flash

  that agrees with the countdown

  of clicks that crown the bottom

  of the black, triggering stove-heat

  to rise with the tightly knit noise

  of mobs in the street. Demands

  for me to give up raising that song

  as my child, getting louder;

  to declare every minute spent

  convincing that flash to be a flame

  we could carry, that in turn

  would carry us, for at least

  a few moments past

  the border, into an afterlife of baked

  parking lots & payphones, beyond the wall

  commonly known as the brow

  of God, as a failure.

  After hours that could have held water

  & didn’t, after moments that flickered

  like moths but never frenzied the light.

  After a day of pouring myself tea

  from Death’s immaculate silver kettle,

  with everyone standing carefully back—

  I walked out, the Yes

  from that morning blazed in my

  palm. Held like the last match

  in the book, handled like a fledgling

  fallen from the branches

  of the zeitgeist. Passing

  eyes that stopped everything

  to accuse me of petty arson, senseless

  blasphemy, felony sex. Passing

  the supremely unchosen, stares

  that stood unlit in doorways,

  the incremental wives, with only a few

  others that kicked ant piles to join me.

  It led us to an altar with a Dance of Death

  scene in miniature: tide of skeletons

  on emaciated horses galloping toward

  small astonished figures of man.

  By the time it took us to the altar with

  the Virgin Mary seated next to Santa Muerte—

  arranged as if not caring who sees them

  at the same table—we were fifteen

  with one flame between us. But down

  to just me again at the improvised dock

  where that Yes was payment, & the sound

  of aluminum shadows, empty cans

  twisting, signaled the ferryboat coming.

  Part II

  Sixty-eight were found without heads,

  feet, or hands, making the road a land

  of taillights, flames for miles blown out

  after those of us driving, fed up, abandoned

  our minds for the Ferris wheel horizon

  above lots & tents. Consuelo woke up

  that day to billboards, advertised promises

  to dump rival cartels & their families

  where their bodies would best decorate

  the ground. Sumidero’s plaza brimmed

  with hissed thoughts & gossip, bitterness

  of why & who to blame, flooding

  the monument whose folded arms became

  pathetically symbolic of the State.

  And just as demands to topple the statue

  came to a boil, the morgue-bound

  procession of those bodies made everyone

  step aside & pause. This is how Consuelo

  & I met. Of all the drivers who gave up

  getting to the other side of their lives

  that night, I was the only one dancing

  after satisfying a terrible need

  to vandalize something in an unfinished

  church with a few cans of paint God

  must have left sealed for me. Consuelo

  the impossible stranger, who took my arm,

  told me have respect, but underneath

  wanted to know how I could be

  celebrating despite those bodies in black

  plastic bags making their way thru.

  One moment, the vehicle

  set on fire at the intersection

  is a mirror at the bottom

  of the world where we gather

  to divine what will remain.

  The next moment, it’s the reflection

  we run away from when the flames

  rise & start licking the wires

  between poles. One moment,

  people in the streets are a river

  picking up speed as the sirens

  get closer. The next moment,

  police lined up with shields

  & clubs in their fists are just

  another wall to throw rocks at.

  I remember sleeves of tear gas

  hazing the streets. Consuelo

  ducking me under her shawl,

  saying we needed to escape

  the commotion—how quickly

  it came to me where we might

  find some privacy & a bird’s-eye

  view of the drop to a new

  low of lawlessness.

  At the top of the Ferris wheel, the city

  on the other side of the blackout, dressed

  in bridges & blinking lights, stared

  at our sudden death with an utter lack

  of surprise. Windows wide awake

  mocked our existence on the wrong side

  of the wall. But this moment—stranded

  at the apex of the dark, after the veins of all

  machinery ran dry, before the panic settled

  to dull frustration—when Consuelo seized

  my wrist white, told me always in her dreams

  an anguished dog yearns to be saved

  from the argument it’s having with its tail.

  This blackout is what it wanted, to be taken

  by the scruff, to be stranded in an instant

  where the difference between life and death

  is a hummingbird. She took my hand into

  her dress, told me the difference was smoke,

  a snuffed candle’s hair. The difference between

  black & black if it bled. In between her thighs

  the weather was strawberries, the weather

  was her rushing to get me inside.

  To say I love you put a bird on a wire

  so I told her enough times to get an abacus

  going in the sky. To follow her body

  made my heartbeat a flight of stairs,

  of swallows twisting up to the tower

  of a bell which went silent on the condition

  of Consuelo & me & dusk & the roofs suddenly

  everywhere around us. We weren’t afraid,

  what people thought of us on a distant

  ship that would never reach the shore,

  & since every day Death said hello in

  a different manner, not one kiss went

  missing, not one ecstatic gaze, nor

  the desire to love each other above

  the apathy of passing cars, the people

  coming to church, crossing themselves

  & us, giving up their blessing by mistake.

  The paletero barking out his flavors,

  making us laugh, because what kind

  of ice cream man is angry.

  Looking to get my name written on

  a tiny skull, I chose Co
nsuelo’s instead.

  Paid the vendor with a hole in his hand,

  that coin slot bribed barely, but this time

  for good. Walked away from his smile,

  let the sugar dissolve on my tongue,

  & soon enough a town surviving

  like a fire at the bottom of an ocean

  became a memory of the future:

  where a gate keeps the lunatic eyes from trotting down,

  where the feast wolves want in the yards is bound to happen,

  where the wind that trickles downhill to breeze thru plumage is God,

  & branches hold the sleeping hens that blink in & out of my dreams like devices.

  Instructions or, Consuelo’s Yes

  Tear a window on the pomegranate’s

  flesh, smell the bright blood

  of its seeds, rest it on the shoulder

  of the grave, let that wound be a light

  you left on, place it in the manner

  that best punctuates the still life:

  gravestone, gray flowers, grade

  of moss & lichen grimed over

  a three-year Fall. Walk the path

  away. Think of the garden you’ll inherit

  if you turn back, patina on petals, cobweb

  branches, foliage veiled with time lost.

  Red for the dismantled weight of your thoughts,

  red for promises of bloodshed on billboards lit up & for once, unkept,

  red for the tablecloth snatched out perfectly from underneath Death’s supper.

  Take the memory of that scent, lock it

  in a drawer whose key you’ll have to

  swallow. With you there are moments

  sunlight never touches with its fingertips.

  With you fire-damp flowers that sway

  on a seafloor. With you this need

  to arrive at a glowing curtain, enter

  the photo booth, & let it give you

  a strip of your real face to place

  in the corner of your vanity.

  The first time I saw Death her dress

  was a tripwire. I found a man slumped

  under the branches of a huizache, held

  hostage by the heat to its shade, his hand

  over the wound in his stomach like a lid

  that must throttle. He didn’t ask for help

  or water. He looked up, gave me the lame

  bird of his handshake. Whispered for me

  to sit down next to him. So I could see

  what he was seeing: in the distance a city

  underwater, the Skinny Lady severing

  a silver thread with her scythe.

 

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