Poems From: Let The Ice Speak

 

BAPTISM

Light dim as the crumbled leather

of old books, and Granny next to me

leaning down with her smell of lime cologne,

finger moving across the small black shapes.

She pointed to the clusters in their tidy lines,

barely stopping under each one, as the minister

kept on talking. My baby sister slept

as he held her, no one else

seemed to breathe.

                                    But Granny’s finger led

my eyes on and on, back and forth, down the page,

and then I saw: she reached the at the same time

the minister said the, and it happened again,

two lines down, and there were the’s everywhere

on those pages—“even unto the end of the world,”

her finger moved as he said the words

out loud, “the kingdom, and the power,

and the glory,” naming.

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(First appeared in Concho River Review)

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BLACK SHEEP, WHITE STARS

He’d appear like a bird

that wanders into a place

on its way between two continents.

Surrounded by houses

that sopped up sparkle like sponges

he’d roll out of a ’47 black Cadillac

and wave a bottle of rum

shimmering in the sun like amber.

“Pam, darling,” he’d call to my mother,

his voice so raucous

Mrs. Simonitch next door

would move one slat of her Venetian blinds.

His toes pushed from limp huaraches

and he grinned as if he knew

just how much acid

the sight of him

shadow-bearded, yellow under the arms,

produced in my father’s stomach.

When he talked

our windows grew arches, opened doors

onto courtyards, lemon trees, parrots,

we could hear the rustling of green feathers,

the chirrings and cawings of orange birds.

Small on the sofa I said

“Let me come live with you,”

something in my lungs knowing

that in a place named Jlayacapan

people might swallow drinks

the colors of bougainvillea

and move at night

to music that had never heard

of a metronome.

And when Uncle Dick and his friend Pedro

sat me between them

on the Cadillac’s dusty front seat

to watch High Society at the Frontier Drive In,

I held myself taut and sweaty, dreaming stars

thicker than sugar on oatmeal,

stars farther than heaven,

stars and hibiscus and mangoes

that could cluster around a life

as long as a laugh.

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(First appeared in Poetry)