150 Father poems

at Las Villas, a small Carol City bar with a makeshift stage, where he spends too much time drinking, pretending he can learn to play the guitar at forty-five, become a singer, a musician, who writes about "Que Difícil Es...." to live in Spanish in Miami, a city yet to be translated, in a restaurant where he has taken us for Cuban food, where I sit, frozen, unable to make a sound, where Mother smiles, all her teeth exposed, squeezes my hand, where Mae and Mitzy hide under the table shielding them from shame with a blood-red tablecloth, leaving my mother and me, pale-faced, trapped by the spotlight shining in our eyes, making it difficult for us to pretend we do not know the man in the white suit pointing to us.

You want to know what work is? I’ll tell you what work is: Work is work. You get up. You get on the bus. You don’t look from side to side. You keep your eyes straight ahead. That way nobody bothers you—see? You get off the bus. You work all day. You get back on the bus at night. Same thing. You go to sleep. You get up. You do the same thing again. Nothing more. Nothing less. There’s no handouts in this life. All this other stuff you’re looking for— it ain’t there. Work is work.

Emma Wallace, 23 Farm Hand Seymour, Iowa I came hungry into the world, and for that, look no further than my Pa. A history buff and a small-p poet, he built so many book- shelves, our house became the local lending library. At least to those few who knew a book to be a friend.

The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother’s countenance Could not unfrown itself. The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle; At every step you missed My right ear scraped a buckle. You beat time on my head With a palm caked hard by dirt, Then waltzed me off to bed Still clinging to your shirt.

The ones his age who shook my hand on their way out sent fear along my arm like heroin. These weren’t men mute about their feelings, or what’s a body language for? And I, the glib one, who’d stood with my back to my father’s body and praised the heart that attacked him? I’d made my stab at elegy, the flesh made word: the very spit in my mouth was sour with ruth and eloquence. What could be worse? Silence, the anthem of my father’s new country. And thus this babble, like a dial tone, from our bodies.

She could live on chips on paint chips potato chips the poker chips he stacked in towers on the nightstand she could live in glass or underground or in his Cadillac she lived inside his head his cowboy boots she found a scorpion in once stabbed him in the shoulder by mistake he called her lucky charm called her witch made her practice in a walk-in closet how to cast a spell draw fortune how to make herself more pretty she dreamed she buried the brother she didn’t have dreamed her brother was dwarfed he died when her father called her pet he died when her father left she learned to live in the parking lot alone outside the casino learned to live at the bar by the pool tables theatres where men shot men raped women shot women shot themselves skinned animals ran one another over and over she learned to live in his smoke his vodka his idea of perfection the perfect girl the perfect evening unencumbered by her needs she dreamed of being buried on her knees her knees are plum so cute and sore so sturdy the father is dying now the girl is grown she dances with knives in her panties the men love her knives she loves the mistakes she makes the knives are her father the men are her father the panties are wool are sheep she dances in sheep with knives she strips off the sheep and for a moment feels her flesh at peace with her flesh she almost puts away the knives almost lets the men lose interest there is still so much work to do

October2017 You once said:My reward for this life will be a thousand pounds of dirt shoveled in my face. You were wrong. You are seven pounds of ashes in a box, a Puerto Rican flag wrapped around you, next to a red brick from the house in Utuado where you were born, all crammed together on my bookshelf. You taught me there is no God, no life after this life, so I know you are not watching me type this letter over my shoulder. When I was a boy, you were God. I watched from the seventh floor of the projects as you walked down into the street to stop a public execution. A big man caught a small man stealing his car, and everyone in Brooklyn heard the car alarm wail of the condemned:He’s killing me. At a word from you, the executioner’s hand slipped from the hair of the thief.The kid was high, was all you said when you came back to us. When I was a boy, and you were God, we flew to Puerto Rico. You said: My grandfather was the mayor of Utuado. His name was Buenaventura. That means good fortune. I believed in your grandfather’s name. I heard the tree frogs chanting to each other all night. I saw banana leaf and elephant palm sprouting from the mountain’s belly. I gnawed the mango’s pit, and the sweet yellow hair stuck between my teeth. I said to you:You came from another planet. How did you do it? You said:Every morning, just before I woke up, I saw the mountains. Every morning, I see the mountains. In Utuado, three sisters, all in their seventies, all bedridden, all Pentecostales who only left the house for church, lay sleeping on mattresses spread across the floor when the hurricane gutted the mountain the way a butcher slices open a dangled pig, and a rolling wall of mud buried them, leaving the fourth sister to stagger into the street, screaming like an unheeded prophet about the end of the world. In Utuado, a man who cultivated a garden of aguacate and carambola, feeding the avocado and star fruit to his nieces from New York, saw the trees in his garden beheaded all at once like the soldiers of a beaten army, and so hanged himself. In Utuado, a welder and a handyman rigged a pulley with a shopping cart to ferry rice and beans across the river where the bridge collapsed, witnessed the cart swaying above so many hands, then raised a sign that told the helicopters:Campamento los Olvidados: Camp of the Forgotten. Los olvidados wait seven hours in line for a government meal of Skittles and Vienna sausage, or a tarp to cover the bones of a house with no roof, as the fungus grows on their skin from sleeping on mattresses drenched with the spit of the hurricane. They drink the brown water, waiting for microscopic monsters in their bellies to visit plagues upon them. A nurse says:These people are going to have an epidemic. These people are going to die. The president flips rolls of paper towels to a crowd at a church in Guaynabo, Zeus lobbing thunderbolts on the locked ward of his delusions. Down the block, cousin Ricardo, Bernice’s boy, says that somebody stole his can of diesel. I heard somebody ask you once what Puerto Rico needed to be free. And you said:Tres pulgadas de sangre en la calle: Three inches of blood in the street. Now, three inches of mud flow through the streets of Utuado, and troops patrol the town, as if guarding the vein of copper in the ground, as if a shovel digging graves in the backyard might strike the ore below, as if la brigada swinging machetes to clear the road might remember the last uprising. I know you are not God. I have the proof: seven pounds of ashes in a box on my bookshelf. Gods do not die, and yet I want you to be God again. Stride from the crowd to seize the president’s arm before another roll of paper towels sails away. Thunder Spanish obscenities in his face. Banish him to a roofless rainstorm in Utuado, so he unravels, one soaked sheet after another, till there is nothing left but his cardboard heart. I promised myself I would stop talking to you, white box of gray grit. You were deaf even before you died. Hear my promise now: I will take you to the mountains, where houses lost like ships at sea rise blue and yellow from the mud. I will open my hands. I will scatter your ashes in Utuado.

I buried my father in the sky. Since then, the birds clean and comb him every morning and pull the blanket up to his chin every night. I buried my father underground. Since then, my ladders only climb down, and all the earth has become a house whose rooms are the hours, whose doors stand open at evening, receiving guest after guest. Sometimes I see past them to the tables spread for a wedding feast. I buried my father in my heart. Now he grows in me, my strange son, my little root who won’t drink milk, little pale foot sunk in unheard-of night, little clock spring newly wet in the fire, little grape, parent to the future wine, a son the fruit of his own son, little father I ransom with my life.

An apple paring curled from the knife wetly down my thumb— and what I had failed to do rightly touching that life next to mine, wearing late afternoon’s numb luminosity, impaled me. A hunter knee-deep in salt marsh, whom Anton Chekov might have set there and then left, back to doctoring, or choked off as too dark, wanton, met the steep flailing of teal, trailed their shrill lift, but stood only, hearing them. Pouring the last tea of an evening, dark amber alive, breathing in quintessence of India, I felt limber bark sheathing the shrub of my life’s tree with root good, but dense, dark, local, raw there, and so in dark woke, the seeing doctor, two simple profiles of linked characters in his air, cruel, good, a pair ample, true across that split yoke, true to its splayed force— simple so rare, though.

in a Tex-Mex restaurant. His co-workers, unable to utter his name, renamed him Jalapeño. If I ask for a goldfish, he spits a glob of phlegm into a jar of water. The silver letters on his black belt spell Sangrón. Once, borracho, at dinner, he said: Jesus wasn’t a snowman. Arriba Durango. Arriba Orizaba. Packed into a car trunk, he was smuggled into the States. Frijolero. Greaser. In Tucson he branded cattle. He slept in a stable. The horse blankets oddly fragrant: wood smoke, lilac. He’s an illegal. I’m an Illegal-American. Once, in a grove of saguaro, at dusk, I slept next to him. I woke with his thumb in my mouth. ¿No qué no tronabas, pistolita? He learned English by listening to the radio. The first four words he memorized: In God We Trust. The fifth: Percolate. Again and again I borrow his clothes. He calls me Scarecrow. In Oregon he picked apples. Braeburn. Jonagold. Cameo. Nightly, to entertain his cuates, around a campfire, he strummed a guitarra, sang corridos. Arriba Durango. Arriba Orizaba. Packed into a car trunk, he was smuggled into the States. Greaser. Beaner. Once, borracho, at breakfast, he said: The heart can only be broken once, like a window. ¡No mames! His favorite belt buckle: an águila perched on a nopal. If he laughs out loud, his hands tremble. Bugs Bunny wants to deport him. César Chávez wants to deport him. When I walk through the desert, I wear his shirt. The gaze of the moon stitches the buttons of his shirt to my skin. The snake hisses. The snake is torn.