Angela C. Trudell Vasquez

Recycled over and over people born look like parents, grandparents, sister or brother, or perhaps a throwback from an earlier ancestor, the hawk nose, a hard ridged forehead, the cleft in the chin or a blue birthmark on the arm, the stomach, the dainty fresh bum of a newborn each unique like a snowflake never can you guess what’s on their mind sometimes I can feel what they’re feeling detect it like hairs on the back of my arms, together we live, talk, walk the same sidewalks, to die buried in a foreign cemetery for others to sit upon ponder their own light, why am I free, what must I do, does someone love me like I do, new skin gives way to wrinkles, hair fades to gray, bones grow strong then decay, strength seeps every time one pees, sleeps, ages, loves, muscles grow then shrink the body a temporary vessel destination unknown. April 28, 2002

I can smell the sweet scent of my own sweat as I blow high with the breeze and swing, I pump my legs like a child again my skinny kid’s butt holds me down, keeps me grounded when adults threaten to pull me off. My chain breaks as I tempt to kiss the sun, my knees have a life of their own bending as if my very existence depended on it, and it does, for I’d rather be a nut flying high over people’s heads than on the ground dying touching the earth, staining the water with my unclean mind, my hands washing red off the money so I can sleep off my power trip and back stabbing toys. I was an old soul at five spouting off about the filth of my generation. I knew greed was the root of all evil, competition in close cousin. I had my doubts about civilization as I found it and convinced my sister Tricia to wear flannel jammies zipped to the throat in the summer to protect us from the babysitter’s bloodsucking husband while our parents went out for supper. July 2, 1998

If the ashes of Mark Twain lie in the Mississippi River then I’m sure he does rise up some days emerge from dark polluted depths to walk over water to land and scans the horizon for change being a curious sort, he sees the crisis rise again another war on the horizon and shakes his craggy head to say no not again he hopes truth-sayers still exist who don’t have to wait until their dead. December 2002

White-Mexican looks like a Latina, not my label a question from a Guatemalan student who's come undone in my ESL class, doesn't get my kind I try to describe how I grew up in Caucasian corn country surrounded by houses on cul-de-sacs that all looked the same, how we were alone in a town of 5000, one black family, one Indian family, one Asian family, and one household of Mexicans, no two, us and the Renterias to whom we were related by marriage before and after my divorce, and they were mixed; still, it was a good living, happy in our cocooness, our oneness, separated by money one direction color on the other: classes, classes, classes, day and night we took lessons: piano, jazz, tap, ballet, the dance team, trumpet, trombone, tennis, Finishing School, and one awful summer golf; Christened, Confirmed, Cathechismized; it all cut me in several places, molding of head and heart making me ultrasensitive, then and now, an observer of the outside, an outsider among my own kind, my very shade, mysterious aloof black haired beauty who can't speak Spanish, living among blue eyed dyed blond bombshells, who held up her head higher because she's shy not stuck-up, understood, undenied, sacrificed to at any price by my beloved little brown parents who taught me well gave up so much so their daughters could shine and they'd swell with pride at the life they had given us, on Sundays we basked in mutual admiration after mass singing our church songs while making breakfast, according to the unspoken doctrine in our house of: fast first eat later after communion, we intruded with our Mexican music bellowing out the open windows the smell of bacon frying, pancakes baking, coffee and eggs scrambled to order it wafted out on beautiful summer mornings out of our house in Pleasant Hill, Iowa, perched on the highest spot one could reach on the East Side of the street for first and second generation immigrants. January 25, 2001