David Tomas Martinez

My childhood was not an anxious place, though I lay in my bed, awake, thumbing my sheets like beads, wondering when the sun imploded would Russian astronauts be OK, they in their Sputniks, with their space dogs, they that chased their own tail around this water bowl we call Earth. When I was a child, in elementary school we practiced a type of protection called Duck and Cover, where we huddled under desks in case of a nuclear attack by the Russians. They were communists, had the bomb, and were evil Reagan told us from the small grave of a TV screen. In the sixties, Nixon said the same thing, and the Panthers countered with "the Viet Cong never called me nigger" With their picks like unclenched fists, with their afros like the plume of an atom bomb, they scared white and black folks alike. It is 2014, and America is still scared of the Russians and black people; now the American Dream is to be debt free, which I am not, nor may ever be, but at least I'm no longer afraid of the Russians.

The only Mexican that ever was Mexican, fought in the revolution and drank nightly, and like all machos, crawled into work crudo, letting his breath twirl, then clap and sing before sandpaper juiced the metal. The only Mexican to never sit in a Catholic pew was born on Halloween, and ate his lunch wrapped in foil against the fence with the other Mexicans. They fixed old Fords where my grandfather worked for years, him and the welder Juan wagered each year on who would return first to the Yucatan. Neither did. When my aunts leave, my dad paces the living room and then rests, like a jaguar who once drank rain off the leaves of Cecropia trees, but now caged, bends his paw on a speaker to watch crowds pass. He asks me to watch grandpa, which means, for the day; in town for two weeks, I have tried my best to avoid this. Many times he will swear, and many times grandpa will ask to get in and out of bed, want a sweater, he will ask the time, he will use the toilet, frequently ask for beer, about dinner, when the Padres play, por que no novelas, about bed. He will ask about his house, grandma, to sit outside, he will question while answering, he will smirk, he will invent languages while tucked in bed. He will bump the table, tap the couch, he will lose his slipper, wedging it in the wheel of his chair, like a small child trapped in a well, everyone will care. He will cry without tears—a broken carburetor of sobs. When I speak Spanish, he shakes his head, and reminds me, he is the only Mexican.

I have never been the most mechanically inclined of men. Wrenches, screwdrivers, or shovels have never made nice with me. In the shipyard, I worked alone, in the dark, deep in the bilges of frigates. For two months, I hooked a torch to an oxygen tank with a green line and pulled a red hose through bulkheads to gas. The brass tool hissed like an ostrich when it fed on metal. That day, my flame cut permanent deck fittings; the loops fell like bright oranges; I ripened the rusty metal. I knew that this was a job to baby-sit me, a job they gave to bad burners, beginners playing with their tools: who pretended their brass torches were trumpets, and that gulls in the bay were tables of distracted diners. When my father was a boy, his father loaded him and his siblings in the car and dropped them off downtown so my grandfather could get drunk and my grandmother could pretend he wasn't drinking again. When I was a boy, I enjoyed watching my father dig; with dirt between his palms, he spun the shovel before he dug. As I grew, I tried to stay away from work, even when he paid me. I stayed away from him too. I never understood how he could work around so much grass. For him, life was work. For him, everything was hard. For me, it was not hard. He stalked my mother a long time after their divorce. He never understood she was not sod to be laid, or a sprinkler to be attached to a pvc pipe seven inches in the ground. That pregnant at fifteen was too soon. Neither of us is the most mechanical of men, yet we still pride ourselves on how we fashion our tools. I wake up shivering and crying in an empty bed, the afternoon light entering and leaving an empty bottle of wine near an emptier glass—or roll over and try, and fail, to remember a woman's name, which never really gets old, just uncouth to say so, and feel fixed. To feel fixed is to feel a mechanical spirit, to feel love, or at least to play at paste for an evening, to make believe she will never leave me, as life almost did when I cut the green hose, and was lonely and shaking that day on the deck of the destroyer, looking into the green water, and wondered what would be written on my tomb: "Killed by oxygen was this unmechanical man." In that moment close to death, I only wanted my own lungs. I didn't regret returning home and sleeping on my father's couch. And that summer, I returned to each of the women of my past and bedded them all, trying to reheat our want. I don't regret that—drinking wine and making love, or writing poems and making love, of wanting to stay but nonetheless leaving. I don't regret returning with Said and Spivak, with Weil and Augustine, of telling my father "All sins are an attempt to fill voids" or rebuilding my grandfather's house with Hopkins in my head as I ripped the tar and shingles off the old roof with a shovel. And I am not mad for being the second favorite son, Esau turned inside out. Can't regret saying that summer, I was, in fact, already, a bigger and better man than my father because I understood more. I didn't mind he favored my younger brother, who knew less than him. I favored my brother's way of living, of skating in the park and smoking weed while I studied and wondered for us all. How ridiculous I was that summer for us all; for not attempting to rebuild any of his love that summer, at all.

Though I am more Che than Chavez, I am still a dove. I do not apologize to you. Or to the state of California. The IRS. New York. That administrator I bit in the third grade, who was delicious and sweet. I, oh, so cold. In the mind, the Dionysian defiles walls the Apollonian protects. I am always looking to take something down. Usually it’s me. Two bulls stand on a hill. The younger says, Father, let’s run down and fuck a cow. The father, wiser, longer in the horn, higher on the grass, reminds his son how Moses was also horned, beamed with light, that to handle a massive snake, to charm Pharaoh, to steal fire, to fly, to unzip the sea, is to speak and not tap vanity. Moses descended Mount Sinai with cracked slabs and saw a golden calf. The father said to the young bull, No son, let’s strut down and fuck them all. Thus begins the beef  between bird and bee, the isthmus isolating order from chaos. My mind is made up of so many different cuts of meat. My marbles stay as mixed as my metaphors. As my myths. As myself. At parties my favorite icebreaker involves asking strangers to describe themselves with three words. Their descriptions are a slipping away to change clothes. Identity and irony neatly knit in an ugly Christmas sweater. Sometimes I feel so Socratic: oft-laureled, poison-palmed, toga-partied, exasperated by the masses: I wouldn’t have guessed ambitious. Free-spirited, you don’t say. Other times I feel like the woman rambling among the vapors escaping the ground in Iceland’s volcanic canyon, making a bus an em dash in a rest stop, where some fifty-odd persons searching for themselves in true existentialism are yellow lupines growing on the side of the road. An epiphany can not be achieved, as a cedar waxwing cannot be more cedar qua waxwing. Eventually what we’re looking for appears. Sometimes incitation opens at the bottom of a straw, a spoon, a barrel of wine, the windfall happens while eating farfalle, while flipping through The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. At the moon me the animal roofs atop brownstones, sin vergüenza. Upwards our eyes scamper, a reflex action, when inserting an object in the mouth, even when the object is a gun. Over hills a road erodes the way home. Only after the Coast Guard has readied a helicopter, do we descend the cold volcano in Eldg já to realize we are the woman in the search party looking for ourselves. to poetry. In moments of ecstasy we are lifted At the shore of the Aegean Sea or at the banks of the river Evros, he loosened his sandals while Pegasus stamped the soil, crushing reeds and hoofing away stray wood. The sun bandaged light on a sky that would not heal. Perseus, with eyes heavenward, formed the shapes of gods into clouds, slipped his hand into the woven sack, and felt the flint of primped snakes. He thought, But it is the cold weight of scales that protects. As sure as a child, he lined leaves rocked to sleep by salt water waves for a bed, so as not to, with sand, or with hubris, bruise Medusa’s disunited head. One day, like a beam through skylight, we realize life is a puddle jumper of  tragedy. Some stones sink fast yet still hold light. So phantom are a statue’s busted arms and toes. Everything must go. And yet I still hanger hope when shopping the racks of discount stores. Veni vidi vici when I see Vince, freeze when I see the coiled coif of Versace’s emblem. Like Sisyphus, errybody think they headed for the top. Sing,started from the bottom, to my reflection in the dressing room mirror, now we here boy when I remember that Oh my god Becky, look at her butt passes the Bechdel test. I have eaten from the tree the fig that sullies and seen that the meat’s not always fair. I was, like Perseus and Sir Mix-a-Lot, born by a riv of water, felled by pride when a brown boy, tattooed with age, obsessed with fame, took his talents to Vermont to kiss trees and tap syrup from the sap. There and there and there, he kissed. Here and here he drank. So drunk he hugged an old white woman off the ground. None of the gods I love love me. To be tipsy is to leverage one’s self. Or so I’m told. The pulley is considered civilization’s highest achievement. Icarus killed himself being lifted.

No matter if half the park is concrete and stanchions supporting a bridge, near industrial buildings yellow in the sun, their stalks of smoke soaring awake, next to empty lots and bus stops without seats or signs or schedules, near houses bright with paint the color of dented cans of Spam, men walking the streets to work look longingly towards their doors. No matter if all the murals decay and the statue of Zapata falls, more months pile to be swept, and years ironed, folded, and put away in drawers, and if jail bars bite off chunks of your view, remember a wise gambler's words on craps: call for the dice back. And between rolls, wipe the dust off the dice, as bills coil a foot in the wind because life is a wild emotion lying in the grass, soon to be green. Not even bags of chips, cheetahs with wind, avoid being tackled, gouged, and ripped apart. We all eventually submit, are arched over by a hyena grin and growl in the sun. Soon the spots will show and the world will pull tight with relief as the jungle rallies around us, as we smile now and cry later.

It could have been a car door leaving that bruise, as any mom knows, almost anything could take an eye out, and almost anybody could get their tongue frozen to a pole, which is kind of funny to the point of tears plus a knee slap or two that an eye can be made blue, pink by a baby’s fist, it fits perfectly in the socket. It’s happened to me. Get it? Any scenario is better, beats sitting in a car and hearing someone you love sob, which I have done with a black eye. For me, a woman’s tears are IKEA instructions on the European side. I’m sure for Laius, Oedipus’s father, it was the same. Think of him sleeping after having held a crying Jocasta because they had fought for hours because she was stronger. Who knew better the anger of young Jocasta? Knew that when the oracle, or the police, come, they are taking someone with them. I’m sure Laius looked at the crib and thought better you than me, kid.