Years ago, the wife of the married man I was seeing gave me a sort of maternal talking-to, which was generous on her part, if not a bit perverse, and which in some weird way, made sense: she was thirty years older than I was—slightly older, in fact, than my own mother.

On the day that President Roosevelt died, a tornado hit Boggy, Oklahoma, and wiped it off the face of the earth. My Uncle Granvil was away working on the railroad when his rented house vanished into splinters, his wife and baby girl sucked skyward.

[ . . . ]

*

If only it were possible to wake outside from sleeping in a bed, turn over and be in the damp grass, hot sun and walk in instead of having to walk out.

i

In 1995, in my late forties, I almost died in New Mexico’s Pecos Wilderness. I’d gotten lost and had been desperately trying to find my way out, fearing I was headed in the wrong direction but not knowing what else to do except keep pushing on.

Banishing the Voices

See the mouths open before you finish telling them you’re going.

Watch the breath being drawn. Watch the lecture-on-the-brink fire their gazes:

God, isn’t it beautiful? The year is 1967. Welcome to my town—a virtual sonic prison, with but one solitary radio station that plays anything resembling modern music.

Transistor radios are the aesthetic weapon of choice here in this jerkwater, deep-South hellhole. Downtown you got the JC Penney’s, which features a sad-sack selection of country-and-western horse farts, and other than that, there’s no such thing as a bona fide record store hereabouts.

la desnudez es la materia del desborde

de tu boca llena de pájaros

pueblo despojado decir pueblo es ponerse en peligro

una navaja en la lengua

You are that same boil of a man from my friend’s 7th birthday party who found me hiding under a table and pinched my chin between your hot ham fingers. I have learned since that there are many of you. At la frutería, I am moving quickly to get away from one who is following me.

(tantas tercas palabras que repito y repito)

A tenor de todas estas soledades acumulativas
¿qué ámbitos aducen, qué argumentan
tantas tercas palabras que repito y repito?

a Mayra que me hizo llorar con su poema

Más mar el mar
y más muerte la muerte desde sus orillas
20 Ulises
y una misma añoranza que estalla bajo el agua
20 claveles rojos

Consecuencia del decir es el decir

a pesar de la redundancia Sancho

que hay situaciones que sólo las puede crear el lenguaje

yo te puedo decir ahora por ejemplo

Turns out I looked all wrong. That little hill is a process
where routine trees happen. They’re obvious

without their leaves but go with a certainty
that can only be called

I can
shoot a coin
fixed to a tree

with sap, restrain
a pig by the corner
of its eye socket,

We pass a joint to one another under the cover

of hoodies & hairnets, our bodies perched on

Popeye’s porch who’s on the corner cracking jokes,

clinking bottles w/other boys in baggy black clothes

una mujer de grandes recursos, yo

maraca que sacude sus semillas secas en esquinas

de guetos y cafetines fetiches desfigurando el alfabeto

porque no me queda otra vía para llegar

En esta casa sin hombres no conocemos los privilegios del libre albedrío. Las tareas se dividen democráticamente en el calendario. No hay espacio para cambios ni discusiones; a todas nos toca sudar la supervivencia.

When I’m doing it right, this life

is sweeter and more lethal

than I could ever have imagined.

It's good to know how to be hated

It’s my birthday and I don’t want to go anywhere

with you. Two years ago

someone proposed to me on this day, saying

In my dreams

yours is the whitest thigh

whiter still in August

against your bulk

your tanning brawn

1

The old jazz man at the Crawford Grill sits

at the back of the club; three o’clock

in the day, just killing time. He spits

on the sun-cooked concrete. “Hell,”

he says, “Look at that.” He points