Poetry

my mother once told me
through the smoky air of our living room
after a long drag and a long drink
“the women in our family have been
known to bring out the worst in men”...

I sit
between black lava and ash

dust-brushed and shaken
amid suggestion of bone

in the curve of the place without sky

rose-lipped clouds beneath...

Bent screws.
Yard bricks displaced.
Wooden fence posts splintered.
A late night car hopped the curb,
ramped up my neighbor's driveway
and took out the corner of our fence.
 
A short fence, anyone could step over it with almost no effort,
but it kept people out,
kept us safe from bums,
random drunks, and passers through
that call this part of the city home
too...

This time she is in front of the mirror
plucking at the few white eyelashes growing
among the other dark ones, above one eye
only.  She wears a long grey robe, her hair
pulled off her face, she wonders if she never
moved from in front of this mirror would there
be a point when she stopped seeing this self
or another self...

We turned our backs & spit
out the medicine of salvation.
We let the sun melt us in a
sweet conspiracy of heat.

Liquefied, we seeped
under white, alkaline soil
& shrugged when wagon
train wheels rolled over us...

One man, who is an artist, has two dreams and four children. The first dream of the artist is the multiplication of their dreams by an exponential factor of infinity. If each of these children are a brush and the artist has only one canvas, how much paint will he need to pigment a sky big enough...

the c is as insidious
as a paper cut
as pleasurable as a paper boat—
if you happen to know how to fold
one and let it ride

the u of it lies between your legs
look down lovingly
lucky you if you happen to have one...

The mayor comes over to my table and says I am invited
to join him and el jefe ICE agent for a drink. I walk over
and sit down as the mayor pulls out a small black book
and hands it to the agent. He begins to read aloud:

Richard Vargas, born in Compton, California. Members
of your family came here from Mexico, and you are one
generation removed from picking grapes and cotton.
You went to school, the university, and now call yourself a
“poet"...

When I think of water spilling from a green bottle onto a wooden floor and the danger

it poses to a carpet and the Moroccan women I met once, Berber women with kohl
lined eyes and mehndi on their hands, who made carpets from wool they sheared
themselves, and who ululated on request for pictures because outside of Morocco that’s
what they were, ululating Berber women— ...

        I.        Qualacú

the guiding
light of our journey across this
mesquital was
the cerro indio moon’s pale
cantankerous shine.
                                We
followed
Oñate north across
the desert
winds rippled
the river into mud, the
bosque disappeared into
                                      the badlands...