David Hernandez

We the people, we the one times 320 million, I’m rounding up, there’s really too many grass blades to count, wheat plants to tally, just see the whole field swaying from here to that shy blue mountain. Swaying as in rocking, but also the other definition of the verb: we sway, we influence, we impress. Unless we’re asleep, the field’s asleep, more a postcard than a real field, portrait of the people unmoved. You know that shooting last week? I will admit the number dead was too low to startle me if you admit you felt the same, and the person standing by you agrees, and the person beside that person. It has to be double digits, don’t you think? To really shake up your afternoon? I’m troubled by how untroubled I felt, my mind’s humdrum regarding the total coffins, five if you care to know, five still even if you don’t. I’m angry I’m getting used to it, the daily gunned down, pop-pop on Wednesday, Thursday’s spent casings pinging on the sidewalk. It all sounds so industrial, there’s nothing metal that won’t make a noise, I’m thinking every gun should come with a microphone, each street with loudspeakers to broadcast their banging. We would never sleep, the field always awake, acres of swaying up to that shy blue mountain, no wonder why it cowers on the horizon, I mean look at us, look with the mountain’s eyes we the people putting holes in the people.

Now that the theoretical physicist slash cosmologist has explained to me, has laid out in clean even rows of logic how every atom in my body arrived from a star, a star that blasted apart, and the atoms of my left hand originated from a different sun than my right, I can shine. I can go dark recalling how my grandfather made the vertical blinds rattle when he shoved my grandmother into them. Startled in the yard, I turned to that sound, from the flower bed my eyes were held by the swaying blinds. It took a while for each to line up perfectly straight again, to tell myself she slipped. Only then could I return to stalking the butterflies. My right hand was quick: reach and pinch. I had so many soft wings that summer between my thumb and index, so many of them skewered on cactus needles. I was a kid. I was cruel slash gentle. He was cruel slash gentle. He had witnessed my destroying and I saw across his creased face empathy for them. After his scolding I placed one dead one inside the white envelope of a flower. Under the sun it glowed. Under the moon, more glowing.

Last night I traced with my finger the long scar on my love’s stomach as if I was following a road on a map. I heard the scream of tires, saw the flash of chrome, her six-year-old body a rag doll bleeding at the seams. It is foolish of me to wish I was there before it happened, to reach back thirty years, clasp her small hand and pull her away from that speeding car that turned her organs into bruised fruit. How easily she could have missed her seventh birthday, the lit candles waiting for her to blow out their tiny flames. How easily I could’ve spent last night in a crowded bar instead, my shoulders brushing against strangers, a man on the jukebox singing his heart out to a woman with the prettiest eyes he’s ever seen.

You’re right. I meant “midst,” not “mist.” I don’t know what I was stinking, I mean thinking, soap speaks intimately to my skin every day. Most days. Depending if darkness has risen to my skull like smoke up a chimney floe. Flue. Then no stepping nude into the shower, no mist turning the bathroom mirror into frosted glass where my face would float coldly in the oval. Picture a caveman encased in ice. Good. I like how your mind works, how your eyes inside your mind works, and your actual eyes reading this, their icy precision, nothing slips by them. Even now I can feel you hovering silently above these lines, hawkish, Godlike, each period a lone figure kneeling in the snow. That’s too solemn. I would like to send search parties and rescue choppers to every period ever printed. I would like to apologize to my wife for not showering on Monday and Tuesday. I was stinking. I was simultaneously numb and needled with anxiety, in the midst of a depressive episode. Although “mist” would work too, metaphorically speaking, in the mist of, in the fog of, this gray haze that followed me relentlessly from room to room until every red bell inside my head was wrong. Rung.

The line is long, processional, glacial, and the attendant a giant stone, cobalt blue with flecks of white, I’m not so much looking at a rock but a slab of night. The stone asks if anything inside the package is perishable. When I say no the stone laughs, muted thunderclap, meaning everything decays, not just fruit or cut flowers, but paper, ink, the CD I burned with music, and my friend waiting to hear the songs, some little joy after chemo eroded the tumor. I know flesh is temporary, and memory a tilting barn the elements dismantle nail by nail. I know the stone knows a millennia of rain and wind will even grind away his ragged face, and all of this slow erasing is just a prelude to when the swelling universe burns out, goes dark, holds nothing but black holes, the bones of stars and planets, a vast silence. The stone is stone-faced. The stone asks how soon I want the package delivered. As fast as possible, I say, then start counting the days.

I’m this tiny, this statuesque, and everywhere in between, and everywhere in between bony and overweight, my shadow cannot hold one shape in Omaha, in Tuscaloosa, in Aberdeen. My skin is mocha brown, two shades darker than taupe, your question is racist, nutmeg, beige, I’m not offended by your question at all. Penis or vagina? Yes and yes. Gay or straight? Both boxes. Bi, not bi, who cares, stop fixating on my sex life, Jesus never leveled his eye to a bedroom’s keyhole. I go to church in Tempe, in Waco, the one with the exquisite stained glass, the one with a white spire like the tip of a Klansman’s hood. Churches creep me out, I never step inside one, never utter hymns, Sundays I hide my flesh with camouflage and hunt. I don’t hunt but wish every deer wore a bulletproof vest and fired back. It’s cinnamon, my skin, it’s more sandstone than any color I know. I voted for Obama, McCain, Nader, I was too apathetic to vote, too lazy to walk one block, two blocks to the voting booth For or against a women’s right to choose? Yes, for and against. For waterboarding, for strapping detainees with snorkels and diving masks. Against burning fossil fuels, let’s punish all those smokestacks for eating the ozone, bring the wrecking balls, but build more smokestacks, we need jobs here in Harrisburg, here in Kalamazoo. Against gun control, for cotton bullets, for constructing a better fence along the border, let’s raise concrete toward the sky, why does it need all that space to begin with? For creating holes in the fence, adding ladders, they’re not here to steal work from us, no one dreams of crab walking for hours across a lettuce field so someone could order the Caesar salad. No one dreams of sliding a squeegee down the cloud-mirrored windows of a high-rise, but some of us do it. Some of us sell flowers. Some of us cut hair. Some of us carefully steer a mower around the cemetery grounds. Some of us paint houses. Some of us monitor the power grid. Some of us ring you up while some of us crisscross a parking lot to gather the shopping carts into one long, rolling, clamorous and glittering backbone.