Rigoberto González

We died in your hills, we died in your deserts, We died in your valleys and died on your plains. We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes, Both sides of the river, we died just the same. "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportees)," Woody Guthrie I after the immigration raid Beneath one apple tree the fruit lies flung like the beads from a rosary with a broken string. Another tree stands amused over the strangeness of a shoe that pretends to be an apple in its redness, though it'll never be an apple with that lace stem and a pit where a core should be. The tree at the end of the row will weep over the pillage all week. Around its trunk, debris: straw hats, handkerchief, a basket going hungry for what's out of reach. Somewhere in the orchard a screech goes weaker by the hour. A radio without paws, it cannot claw its chords to end its suffering. But silence comes, eventually, and the apple trees will rest, gathering the shadows to their roots as the flame inside each apple falls asleep. All the while, finches perch among the branches—patient vultures waiting for the fruit to rot. For a wasp, intoxicated by the sugars, this is the perfect place to nest. The colony will thrive inside decay: the apples softening until their wrinkled skins begin to sink, the seeds poking through like teeth. The trees will sway without the wind because the ground will boil with larvae. A bird will feast until it chokes and ants will march into the belly through the beak. II after the ride by bus A strand of hair pretends to be a crack and sticks to glass. A piece of thread sits on a seat, pretends to be a tear. The bus makes believe no one cried into their hands and smeared that grief onto its walls. The walls will keep the fingerprints a secret until the sheen of oils glows by moon. Rows of ghosts come forth to sing. Until that keening rocks the bus to rest, the fumes intoxicate the solitary button—single witness to the shuffling of feet and a final act of fury: the yanking of a wetback's shirt. The button popped right off the flannel, marched in the procession and then scurried to the side. The lesson: if wounded, stay behind to die. The bus breathes out the shapes turned silhouettes turned scent of salt and sweat. The steering wheel unspools, every window shaking loose the wetness of its glare. And now a riddle squats over the parking lot: What creature stands its ground after evisceration? Roadkill. Clouds close in to consume the afterbirth. III after the detention in the county jail A mausoleum also keeps these gems: precipitation that hardens into diamonds on the cobweb stems, streams of urine that shimmer like streaks of gold. Lights coax out the coat of polish on the floor and what's solid softens into water stripped of ripples. Stilled and empty, a river that has shoved its pebbles down its throat. The cell holds out three drops of blood and will barter them for company, hungry for the smell of men again. Janitor, border guard or detainee, it's all the same musk of armpit, garlic breath, oils that bubble up from crack to tailbone, scent of semen from the foreskin, fungus from the toes. Without takers, the keyhole constricts in the cold. IV after the deportation plane falls from the sky A red-tailed hawk breaks through the smoke and doesn't drop the way the bodies did when the plane began to dive and spat pieces of its cargo out the door. No grace, the twitching of such a great machine. No beauty to its blackening inside the pristine canvas of majestic blue—a streak of rage made by a torch and not a paintbrush. The hawk lands on the canyon and snaps its neck in quick response to the vulgar cracking on the boulders, to the shrill of metal puncturing the canyon, to the burst of flames that traps a nest of mice within the lair turned furnace, burning shriek, and hair. Stunned host of sparrows scatters. Fume of feathers, pollution in the air. Poison in the lungs of all that breathes. A darkness rises. The blue absorbs it the way it dissipates a swarm after the crisis of a shattered hive. Heaven shows its mercy also, swallowing the groan that spilled out of the hill. No signs of tragedy by dusk except a star splayed over rock, the reek of fumes—a disemboweled god. V after the clean-up along Los Gatos Canyon What strange flowers grow in the shadow. Without petals and with crooked twigs for stems. The butterflies that pollinated them were bits of carbon glowing at the edge. The solitary lone wolf spider doesn't dare to bite the scorched caul on the canyon. It packs its fangs for brighter lands. The footprints drawn in black do not match the footprints in the orchard though they also bear the weight of the unwanted. The chain gang called upon to gather the debris sang the Prison Blues all afternoon: Inmate, deportee, in your last attempt to flee every bone splits into three. VI after the communal burial Twenty-eight equals one deportation bus equals one cell in the detention center, one plane-load of deportees, one plunge into the canyon, one body in the coffin although one was a woman—sister not alone anymore among the chaperone of angels with wings of stone. Manuel Merino, Julio Barrón, Severo, Elías, Manuel Calderón, Francisco, Santiago, Jaime, Martín, Lupe, Guadalupe, Tomás, Juan Ruiz, Alberto, Ramón, Apolonio, Ramón, Luis, Román, Luis, Salvador, Ignacio Navarro, Jesús, Bernabé, Rosalío Portillo, María, y José. Y un Deportado No Identificado. No papers necessary to cross the cemetery. The sun floods the paths between tombs and everything pushes out into light. No shame to be a cherub without a nose. The wreath will not hide its decay. Cement displays its injuries with no regrets. This is the place to forget about labor and hardship and pain. No house left to build, no kitchen to clean, no chair on a porch, no children to feed. No longing left except a wish that will never come true: Paint us back into the blank sky's blue. Don't forget us like we've forgotten all of you.

after Thomas James The strangers in the woods must mimic squirrels and crackle with the undergrowth. They must not flinch at the cruelty of breaking golden leaves with their feet, or of interring stones. And like any of these deciduous trees in autumn they must be stingy with shadow and move deceptively across the sludge. I listen to these strangers stirring with the evenings. I invent paths for them to the soft edge of the lake. Each descent is as graceful as a sinking ship, but less tragic somehow because these strangers don’t possess a lung. I cannot hear them breathe, yet the air is all whispers, all sighs—the same ethereal muscle that rubs the color off the foliage. I lost my way out of the woods on the night every bird went south or numb. A plump rat snatched the moon and dragged it by the white rope of its tail. The strangers were a cloak of silhouettes flattening against a trunk like bark. I must have disappeared among them because the mouth I touched was not my own and was cruelly closing in on someone’s rib. I carried such a bite on me, an arc of green and yellow on my side from the man who said he loved me. In that darkness I knew as much about him as I did of the amputee swimming his way up the hill with his only arm. So this is the home of the unturned stone where the fugitive keeps his kiss! Archeologists will discover a paradise in the place no touch died of neglect. Is it any wonder all things forgotten or abandoned find their way here? The winter is back, so too the bloated body of a book I tossed over the bridge last week. And there on the bench, is my old smoking habit, a cigarette glowing on my mouth like a beacon. I’m patient, waiting for the fugitive to claim me as his own. I’m as wise as any stranger here, alone but with the knowledge that the grief of separation is always brief.

Once upon a time there was a soldier who marched to Mictlán in his soldier boots and every step was a soldier step and every breath was a soldier word. Do you know what this soldier said? I'd like a piece of bread for my soldier hand. I'd like a slice of cheese for my soldier nose. And I'd like a woman for my soldier heart. The mayor of Mictlán saluted the soldier and bowed his head as he told the soldier: We have no bread, oh honorable soldier, we hold empty hands instead. Dear soldier, let us take yours if we may. And the soldier held out his hand to be taken. Oh brave soldier, said the mayor, cheese is your soldier wish, but we have none since the other soldier left. We whiff empty hands instead. The soldier let the mayor sniff the scent of his soldier palm. And forgive us, oh strong soldier, said the mayor, but no woman worthy of soldier warmth lives in our empty town. Will your soldier eyes teach us wonder and kindness and soldier love instead? Silence stiffened the soldier face as a search ensued in the soldier head for a moment one moment of soldier bliss. But all was dead. The longer the soldier looked the more the streets of his soldier mind resembled the streets that his soldier feet had taken him to: where no lost soldier finds bread or cheese or a woman to be a soldier wife. This was no space for a soldier life indeed. So off to the hills the soldier fled to seek out the place where a soldier sheds the rattle that beckons the soldier to death to soldier to death to soldier.

The nightclub’s neon light glows red with anxiety as I wait on the turning lane. Cars blur past, their headlights white as charcoal. I trust each driver not to swerve. I trust each stranger not to kill me and let me cross the shadow of his smoky path. Trust is all I have for patrons at the bar: one man offers me a line, one man buys the kamikaze, another drinks it. Yet another wraps his arm around my waist. I trust him not to harm my body as much as he expects his body to remain unharmed. One man asks me to the dance floor, one asks me to a second drink, another asks me home. I dance, I drink, I follow. I can trust a man without clothes. Naked he conceals no weapons, no threat but the blood in his erection. His bed unfamiliar, only temporarily. Pillows without loyalty absorb the weight of any man, betray the scent of the men who came before. I trust a stranger’s tongue to tell me nothing valuable. It makes no promises of truth or lies, it doesn’t swear commitments. The stranger’s hands take their time exploring. Undisguised, they do not turn to claws or pretend artistic skill to draw configurations on my flesh. They are only human hands with fingertips unsentimental with discoveries, without nostalgia for what they leave behind. I trust this stranger not to stay inside me once he enters me. I trust him to release me from the blame of pleasure. The pain I exit with no greater than the loneliness that takes me to the bar. He says good night, I give him back those words, taking nothing with me that is his. The front door shuts behind me, the gravel driveway ushers me away. The rearview mirror loses sight of threshold, house, sidewalk, street. Driving by the nightclub I pass a car impatient on the turning lane. My hands are cold and itch to swerve the wheel, to brand his fender with the fury of my headlights. But I let this stranger live to struggle through the heat and sweat of false affections, anonymous and borrowed like the glass that washed my prints to hold another patron’s drink.

Oh father, oh music man with a whistle instead of a coin to toss on your walks, keep these things for us until we're ready to come home: our baby teeth, fragments of bone that rattle in a domino box. Tuck it in your pocket but please don't gamble it away the way you lost our christening gowns in poker. We had outgrown them, true, but what other proof did we have that all seven of our outfits could be stacked and shuffled like a deck of cards. Keep the bottle cap opener hanging by a string. Wear it like a locket and stay collared to our after-school bliss when we found you underneath a tree that scattered glass fruit around your feet. The boys lined them up for death by slingshot, and the girls giggled when the bodies shattered. Take good care of our drawings, our crooked handwriting exercises, the scribbles of our names, and sew a suit with sailboats on the sleeves, a coat with Qs sliding down a wire, and pants that celebrate our prepubescent autographs. And in your shoe— don't tell us which! let us guess!— save the coin you told us came from China. It had a hole in the middle because the merchants slid their change on chopsticks. We pictured them on market Sundays holding up their earnings like a shish kabob. We know you hid the coin because all seven of us wanted it and so you took it with you. Or so I claimed. Can I be blamed, oh father, oh story man, for wanting to possess the single thing that couldn't be shared? You saw me slide it out the window of your wallet while you napped and didn't snap to attention to complain. Of all your sons and daughters it is I who wanted to escape the most, to anywhere. I learned the desperate alchemy of flowering a barren day with song from you, oh master. A minstrel needs his freedom. And so you let me take it.

Just when I had long outgrown those late-night seizures in my hand, those involuntary impulses return to make my fingers twitch like the tips of twigs after the bird leaps off the branch— what a crafty little devil, bouncing back all feathered and ticklish, jittery with pleasure when it finally finds its nest. The sheets become as damp as the sweaty shirts that cling to the backs of men at the dance, and how I pity the girls who undress their lovers before sex. When I started loving other bodies instead, allowing other temporary guests to mold their shapes inside my flesh— a torso of my arm, a shoulder of my mouth, a waist or a buttock of my leg—I had no need to concentrate my rapture to a single sticky place since every movement in my skin was slowing down inside the vat of honey I was swimming in. Oh bath with tongue, oh alchemy of heat and bed. The memory of so much sex enough to keep me sated in the quieter evenings of my third and final age. So imagine my surprise when those possessions from my adolescence woke me up again, but in the guise of scribbling from my pen. Not fancy or confession but something in the middle, like the mole that snuggles in the space between my breasts, that glorious discovery that makes the men cry out, the women shudder with anticipation or intent. It's more like poetry, because it whistles through the paper like the weekend afternoons I summoned passersby from behind the window's curtain. What wonder to seduce with sound, granting serendipitous fantasy—here a table with rotating thighs, there a closet panting with exhaustion, there the eye of the voyeuristic clock bold and looking to be satisfied with one pair of feet pointing at two opposite corners of the room, three fingers always vanishing inside the cluster of four hands that motion slowly left, slowly right— the capricious current of the underwater flower, five limbs comparing lengths and flexibility, their competition sabotaged by the arrival of a sixth contender, seven escalating levels in the throat— whimper, grunt, moan, sigh, whine, hum, groan, cry—oh, and if we're lucky, thinks the grinning clock, we will spiral up the scale (and down again) a good eight times, nine would be too much to ask, though not impossible since there was once a record-breaking tenth, remember? Eleven minutes for a quickie; at least twelve positions for a marathon

I am not your mother, I will not be moved by the grief or gratitude of men who weep like orphans at my door. I am not a church. I do not answer prayers but I never turn them down. Come in and kneel or sit or stand, the burden of your weight won't lessen no matter the length of your admission. Tell me anything you want, I have to listen but don't expect me to respond when you tell me you have lost your job or that your wife has found another love or that your children took their laughter to another town. You feel alone and empty? Color me surprised! I didn't notice they were gone. Despite the row of faces pinned like medals to my walls, I didn't earn them. The scratches on the wood are not my scars. If there's a smell of spices in the air blame the trickery of kitchens or your sad addiction to the yesterdays that never keep no matter how much you believe they will. I am not a time capsule. I do not value pithy things like locks of hair and milk teeth and ticket stubs and promise rings—mere particles of dust I'd blow out to the street if I could sneeze. Take your high school jersey and your woman's wedding dress away from me. Sentimental hoarding bothers me. So off with you, old couch that cries in coins as it gets dragged out to the porch. Farewell, cold bed that breaks its bones in protest to eviction or foreclosure or whatever launched this grim parade of exits. I am not a pet. I do not feel abandonment. Sometimes I don't even see you come or go or stay behind. My windows are your eyes not mine. If you should die inside me I'll leave it up to you to tell the neighbors. Shut the heaters off I do not fear the cold. I'm not the one who shrinks into the corner of the floor because whatever made you think this was a home with warmth isn't here to sweet-talk anymore. Don't look at me that way, I'm not to blame. I granted nothing to the immigrant or exile that I didn't give a bordercrosser or a native born. I am not a prize or a wish come true. I am not a fairytale castle. Though I used to be, in some distant land inhabited by dreamers now extinct. Who knows what happened there? In any case, good riddance, grotesque fantasy and mirth. So long, wall-to-wall disguise in vulgar suede and chintz. Take care, you fool, and don't forget that I am just a house, a structure without soul for those whose patron saints are longing and despair.