Sheryl Luna

I. The Chihuahua Desert I rose early to wash the desert grime, watch the unearthly flight of doves, the way pigeons were poisoned incorrectly or how an elephant was beaten with a stick. This is the way of beginnings, women charmed by fits of language, the cadence of bees around garbage cans, the laughter of grackles, hot sun baking Coca-Cola to sidewalks. Tumbleweeds and arroyos hush day-long trips through barrios. I am sand. My eyes grainy, tears brown, and what of the different tones of bees or flies, how a sting can kill us? I’m speaking the language of smokers, lung-full and wary, breathing a refinery chore, my eyes black pits, Historically I was fruit, voluptuous and campy, some might say exotic, cheekbones native, my hips swaying. II. The Rio Grande I grew into the silence of third person, a landscape, a mesa. I flew hard into the silence of gray smog, my chest burning, my throat dry with the songs of women with sagging faces, children strapped to their bent backs. They have become a river metaphor, a border, a soulless chant to believers. Maquiladora workers slain and buried in shallow graves. My palms refuse to fold in prayer and god giggles in my red ears. Sand pecks my skin like a drum roll in the hot wind. The march of children, their backpacks plastic, the way they see color a mystery, a dance, the shapes of clouds, an elephant, a dove, a long-lost dog. They sing song their way past the factory-circus. III. The Potomac Years later I loved a blank-faced man in tweed who drank espresso and ate bagels in a deli outside Washington D.C. His pale face mirrored in the glass at a video-store where he grumbled artless and unfilled by the hurried ache of cicadas. His first and last job in the world of mundane labor. He was all red hair; his voice bellowed. Was it the seventh or tenth year he dubbed my language, subtitled my screens? Windows on the metro metalled sand tunneled. I lost the desert dance of blood, half-forgot the closed copper mine, the way the border’s earth is lead-filled and sullen. IV. The Vlatva Awed by cathedrals in Paris, then Prague, I was the archangel of rage with my book-bag, a wordless hum. I began to speak with my hands, my eyes Slavic dark, searching. I worshipped fat swans along the thick river taking in the green wondering why I had been blessed by such beauty. I sensed him in a snowdrift of words historically divine. And what was he or I in this world? I didn’t see the gold specks in his eyes, the way poetry became his glory, full of fan-fare and the strife of strip malls. And here, envying his pristine days, the way the books never cover his mouth, our hearts pump separately to the rhythm of loss.

Lit with strange carpentry magic — they build time-shares in her head. They carve names deep in wood, erect beams of metal to hold up the invincible defense of a bad history. They mourn what’s subjective. They are shutters closed. Sometimes I imagine such men in flip-flops with fat towels draped over confident shoulders. I imagine they all live in Texas, and find South Padre too hot, and then I imagine them blaming diversity for everything. Here, in the middle of grief, we pout to the rhythm of their sentences. Suns hiss in their dreams. Soon such critics will meet daily for prayers. The Pharisees identify the guilty woman. They are gathering sticks for a witch burning. Curandera lit with the fire of sighs, casts spells, burns sage, sweats in a lodge, her own prayers flaming.

I am not saying “mark my words,” as the thief says early each winter. He leaves nothing of value. He too wants. A brute with language, he has a fondness for preaching. I am bathed to luster. Memories move musically through my bones. He sings above, vaults off a horse with feigned kindness, lands so fancy. Letting go of this, sitting with tropical leaves the size of men in a terrarium, I am beautiful. He means well, admonishing women. He is lucky with the show of crankiness. What does it mean to let go the envy? I sometimes hope stars don’t spread themselves over New York’s lights. Performing for himself, glasses glittering, he reads stories of poverty, claims them all as his own. Here in Colorado irises of all colors unfold outwards to the half-hidden sun. On the cracked cement, chilly before rain, I see perpetual beginnings. I’m going to forget him: lock him in a box in my head, lock him in the haunt of violins, let go what’s his in the hurl of breath of my groans.

Tightened jaw, I did not love. Flashback of myself  jerked about, legs high above my head, men laughing, I came to sea drifts, movement and crashing. I found I am not so far from God exploding. Gifting, a friend once said, is why we live. Seven storks still and white on a gold lake. My lazy eye glances back to that original split, myself  high above myself. Whiplashed into forgetting, I didn’t know hours from minutes. I was hypervigilant for catastrophes. My head raging then numb. The early garden bare, and now, shocked with sudden memory, I return to changing sky hues, blooms of lilac bursting along sidewalks. Lazy in the grass, I free myself of guilt, imagine musicians in the park, us overcoming ourselves. My eyes open before stars. Holy these leaves, these skies. What is torn opens for the light.

Little Chihuahita shadowed beside Segundo barrio. A dead German sheperd with a broken neck lies on the side of the street for days. The stench of El Paso’s sewage in the air, a Mexican flag hugely flaps itself above the chain-linked fence topped with razor wire. In the morning blue mountains smog. South side of the border a man jogs. The river’s bank green, small trees bob in the wind like truffle-treats, mirage. Each day thousands cross the open bridge, both ways, each night they go home to sleep silence. Cars hum and wait for hours like sleeping cats. A cemented river half-dried, even the canal drains away. Some say droves of shadows at night move ghost-like through the dying river. These people grow invisible, as if air, irrelevant and holy; at night I can hear the whisper of my grandfather, “all the angels live in Juárez.” There is an old language broken in my throat. Some eyes mistake me for shadow. When I speak my voice a fearful phantom. In spring dust storms come, the sky browns, my visage half-forms beneath the Italian cypress; and when the day’s moon is full in its silence, I am afraid of my own darkness.

Dazed with rambling gossip, their looming net of mistakes, their love of rumor, they all dream arousal. They are far from indifferent. Their language bellows need. A gull darts over and behind bare buildings, shaggy forests, mountains, city streets. Trees lose leaves, and one man insists the leaves aren’t dying after collecting outdated food at church, upswing in full euphoric force, he’s certain he’s spreading world peace. Men at work lumber to dumpsters. Oaks yellow. Rocks trap leaves. Jehovah’s Witnesses mouthed salvation. Janice listened wishful, but today she relays her own bitter story: lazy sister-in-law fat on a couch, quarter-sized bedsores on her ass, brother-in-law blind, stumbling drunk. Hearts rigid and numb, neighbors forget crepe myrtle blooming pink. Impermanent and frenetic worry hums. Eyes grow glaucoma blue. Sucking cigarettes and mumbling, they stand hardy as an autumn day’s geraniums, hard before winter.

The day ended badly with a broken ankle, a jinxed printer, and a dead car. The dry yellow grass against the sunset saved me. Roosters pranced across a lawn of shit, proudly plumed in black feathers, bobbing before the gray goats. It was the first day I saw god in the quiet, and found a mustard seed was very small. There I had been for years cursing “why?” and all the gold in the sun fell upon me. There was a white mare in the midst of brown smog, majestic in the refinery clouds. Even the radio wouldn’t work! My mother limps and her hair falls out. The faithful drive white Chevy trucks or yellow Camrys, and I’m here golden on the smoking shock-less bus. I lost language in this want, each poem dust, Spanish fluttered as music across the desert, even weeds tumbled unloved. The police sirens seared the coming night, dogs howled helplessly sad. Lo I walk the valley of death, love lingers in my hard eyes. Mañana never comes just right. I mend myself in the folds of paper songs, ring my paper bells for empty success.Quiero Nada, if I sing long enough, I’ll grow dreamlike and find a flock of pigeons, white under wings lifting awkward bodies like doves across the silky blue-white sky.

Words fall out of my coat pocket, soak in bleach water. I touch everyone’s dirty dollars. Maslow’s got everything on me. Fourteen hours on my feet. No breaks. No smokes or lunch. Blank-eyed movements: trash bags, coffee burner, fingers numb. I am hourly protestations and false smiles. The clock clicks its slow slowing. Faces blur in a stream of  hurried soccer games, sunlight, and church certainty. I have no poem to carry, no material illusions. Cola spilled on hands, so sticky fingered, I’m far from poems. I’d write of politicians, refineries, and a border’s barbed wire, but I am unlearning America’s languages with a mop. In a summer-hot red polyester top, I sell lotto tickets. Cars wait for gas billowing black. Killing time has new meaning. A jackhammer breaks apart a life. The slow globe spirals, and at night black space has me dizzy. Visionaries off their meds and wacked out meth heads sing to me. A panicky fear of robbery and humiliation drips with my sweat. Words some say are weeping twilight and sunrise. I am drawn to dramas, the couple arguing, the man headbutting his wife in the parking lot. 911: no metered aubade, and nobody but myself to blame.