And though they made fun of the similar girl,
they brought in a step stool for me to climb on
for the minutes required for their clean consciences
to declare him dead. (Six.) Their jimmy-legs tapped
as they studied the clock, while I studied the chest
bending under my palms
while the old woman cried help me, god help me,
and the young one hugged her purse like a doll
while tick tick tick, the miraculous ticking of ticks:
life ratcheted up inside her.
Two of the Furies
The old woman in the parking lot
wields her walker not unspryly. Gray hair
lank and without style, hanging
under her ski hat, as I wear a ski hat—
her legs bare under her skirt,
my legs bare under my skirt,
she wears sneakers, I wear sneakers—
windbreaker, windbreaker. She rolls up
to watch me board, as people do,
because it is interesting
to see the wheelchair maneuvered backward
into the van. You got it?
she asks, as people do
though I am not their child.
We are not sisters either,
despite the wind’s ruffling our skirts in sync—
oh how she is interested in the ruffling of my skirt.
The ruffle makes her giddy, starts
her bald gums racing on their wordless observations
as she peers into my thighs.
How alike we are! says this
no-sister of mine to be argued with,
just some crazy old woman
flashing the terrible crater of her smile
to raise the wind and
prove her point.
Juárez
At night the bones move where the animals take them,
bones of the girls that once were girls,
the hand-bones missing, you know how it goes,
you fill in the blank, the unimaginable X
of horrid futures. From bus stops
before dawn, from outside the maquiladoras
when the horizon bites the sun’s gold coin,
from the hundred places to fail to arrive at
or return from, the bones uncouple
their linkages and travel separate ways.
Too many of them for just one theory—
too many skulls for the drug lords even,
for the husbands the satanists the cross-border whore-killers
…until you start to suspect the dirt itself.
Between the concrete wall and the drainage ditch,
the sheet-metal scraps and collapsed storm fence,
a desert of ocotillo scrub, not even one decent
cowboy cactus, one bent arm
swearing an oath of truth. When I was younger
I wrote this poem many times and don’t know
where I was going with it: so much worship
for every speck of mica giving off
a beam I made into a blade. And you can see
how I turned mere rocks into villains
when it turns out the landscape’s not at fault,
the parched land a red herring — this is not the song
of how the men fried while hiding inside the boxcar
(and even then someone outside locked the door).
My poems took place where the wind-skids sang:
perhaps I’ve been too fond of railroad tracks
and the weedy troughs alongside them, which do
accept most everything. Especially the spikes,
how I loved those spikes cast into silence,
in this case behind the factories, where the grass
grows sparser than in the poor soils of Texas,
a place with completely different ghosts
lying just over the river. To get there
you will have to pass by a large pink cross
made out of such spikes at the border station,
and here’s the main thing, forgive me, I missed in my youth:
how from each spike hangs a name.
Incubus
While the spectacular round butt of the fat junkie sitting on the curb
rotated upward from his belt—
the legs of the skinny junkie wriggled upward from a dumpster.
And when he stood, I saw
his familiar figure, thinned—
two times he’d snipped my kitchen with the scissors of his hips
while he directed stories from the rehab clinic toward us
ladies in our panty hose,
our fingers sliding up and down our wineglass stems.
Later, in the cloak of his jean jacket,
he slipped upstairs and stole my pharmaceuticals,
my legitimate pharmaceuticals!—
so an awkwardness descended on the realm of gestures
there in the alley behind the YMCA, where I looked at any alternate—
pothole, hydrant, not buttocks,
don’t look at buttocks, don’t look at dumpster, don’t. Look:
I would have been a crone to him,
and he would have been my pirate son,
my son who sleeps beneath the bridge
in the cloak of his jean jacket, dabbed with fecal matter now.
Still, when he comes at night,
brass button by button
and blade by blade — his skinny thighs—
I open myself like a medicine cabinet
and let him take the pill bottles from my breasts.
First Epistle of Lucia to Her Old Boyfriends
Not infrequently I find myself wondering which of you are dead
now that it’s been so long since I have had a boyfriend
for whom this wonder would be a somewhat milder version of
the way our actual parting went — i.e., with me not wondering
but outright wishing that an outright lightning bolt
would sail sharply into your thick heads.
Can I plead youth now over malign intent?
And does my moral fiber matter anyhow
since I have not gone forth and et cetera’d—
i. e., doesn’t my absent children’s nondepletion of the ozone layer
give me some atmospheric exchange credits under the Kyoto Protocol
to release the fluorocarbons of these unkind thoughts?
Anyhow what is the likelihood of you old boyfriends reading this
even if you are not dead? Be assured your end is hypothetical.
Also be assured I blush most furiously
whenever that tower room in Ensenada comes to mind
where the mescal functioned as an exchange credit for those lies you told
about your Alford pleas and your ex-wives who turned out not ex at all.
Anyhow the acid rain has caused my lightning to go limp
over bungalows where you have partial custody of your teenagers
and AA affirmations magneted to the fridge
from which your near beers sweat as you wonder if I’m dead,
since the exchange for this-here wonder is your wonder about me.
Even though it shows my nerve — to think you’d think of me at all—
I await word of your undeadness
P.S. along with your mild version of my just reward.
Raised Not by Wolves
The family sank into its sorrows—
we softened like noodles in a pot.
Whereas the bicycle’s bones were painted gold
and stood firm against the house