Poetry

A quiet moment:
me, sitting in the morning,
peeling a tangerine

pliant, fragrant,
generous. I breathe

in citrus groves and
pry soft segments apart,
release a torrent with my tongue.

Perched in the captain seat,
I rolled down the window
of the old minivan
stuck my head out
caress of orange blossom
balm of Florida breeze going by         hush

I peeled fruit for breakfast,
for lunch, four plates
at the table. One for me,
three other mouths
always served the youngest first

At my kitchen table,
I turn away from the sink,
the pots, the lunchboxes waiting
to be filled and emptied and filled again
I am

a person sitting,
eating a tangerine

Twenty so odd stools crowd round a half-wood bar,
filled with patrons in revelry, strangers bound by nothing
more than an ache to quench their thirsts. At day’s end,
we all share some deep recurring innate dryness,
and these guests all have flocked here to take some rest
before they gradually drift away into the night after
last call.

Somewhere between the sound waves and the smoke, there’s
something in the air that smacks of the miraculous:
A pair of hands desperately attacks a tray of glasses with a linen.
The tenders weave around the bottles and the tools like sorcerers
or prelates completing sacred rites. And the servers process
around the floor at breakneck pace, brandishing elixirs and tonics,
crafted for each and every guest who sits at ease confessing
joys and fears and hardships to their neighbors.

It’s a busy night:
Julep, Hawthorne, Collins, and Martini all have aching backs
as the clock makes its eleventh round. Then suddenly
a four top starts to sing along with earth, wind, and fire,
and by the time that everyone’s joined in, two pairs of
feet have started dancing in the corner by the window.
The side mirror tells a tale of spontaneous and
unmitigated joy.

And then it ends,
The stools are pulled out, wiped down, and inverted on the bar top.
All the evening’s apparatus goes through the necessary ablutions,
is absolved of any blemish and tucked in until the morning.
The table where those singers sat is sanatized completely and
in the half light, a mop removes the final traces of a dance held by
the window.

As the last door is locked and I dump out the bucket of mop water,
I begin to wonder why
so much human happiness is always made as if it’d never been
and every night like this always ends with
dirty water flowing
down the
drain.

Summer goes abandoned.
The October-strewn ditchbank
runnels beside my path,
sparing my footfalls any echoes.
Nothing glows but late asters and goldenrods.

The only words I’d speak
would be unwise counsel to no one,
certainly not the cardinal or hawk
who refuse all autumnal vectors south.

I am borne along in a light rain
that emerges like a rumor
wrapped in a whisper.

Like the woman’s voice
I let fade this morning
asking me to leave,
the widening light
splintering her doorway.

The air on the plane is dry
I sip stale coffee
from a paper cup
Your hands look old
my daughter says.

Abuela left Cuba in a plane
to marry her love in New Orleans.
These hands will never wash
or dust or cook, he told her.

Years of bleach and Palmolive
left delicate lines and folds
papered across the whorls of her knuckles,
the backs of her sun-mottled hands.
Her nails were always tapered, polished.

In Cuba, we had evenings
to dance in our frills
the band played so late
we walked
beautiful ladies waved
from their balconies
to their novios below.
We had a finca
I remember the chickens
It was so hot I thought I’d help
I plucked one live to cool her off
qué pecado
She died
I remember our cook’s buñuelos
tan rico
sweet anise syrup dripping
and always a cafecito
Mama sent me to art school
Did you know that a frog has 50 bones?
I had to draw them all by memory
And sabías que a hand has 27?

I don’t know what else
she drew
I can’t ask anymore.

This ground has always been cruel:

the way plate collided
with plate 36 million years ago,
the way heat then bubbled up.
The result? Volcanoes, hot springs,
minerals, the Rio Grande.

Or the way Luis Carvajal
raided the Rio Grande in 1582,
capturing hundreds
of Indians, selling them
as slaves to Mexican haciendas.

Or the way an 18-pound cannon
ball carved out Thornton’s
chest in 1846, the result
of a skirmish at the Rio Grande,
the year that Polk
declared war on Mexico.

Or the way 15 Mexican males
were rounded up in Porvenir,
a city on the banks
of the Rio Grande, then shot
by Texas Rangers in 1918.

Or the way Gov. Abbott
traveled to the Rio Grande,
signed into law S.B. 4,
allowing arrests
since 2023 of anyone
suspected of illegal entry.

Yes, this ground has always been cruel.

If you leave a message that means anything,
I promise I’ll call you. Here’s proof:
It was imperative that I return Ren’s purse
that she left looped to the chairback at the bar last night
when she got blackout drunk.
I texted her three times before realizing
the phone that I was texting was in the purse I held.
So I began the inverse of the long walk
I’d taken home to retrieve my car
to leave the purse with the day bartender
since I had no way of contacting Ren
and I imagined her first move would be
to call up to the bar to see if anyone
had found a purse the night before.
Jimmy, the owner, had bought me that last shot
of Canadian Club, raised his glass, and said,
“One for the ditch,” but if I made
one good decision last night without endorsing
some lax notion of free will, it was because
I didn’t know I’d hear the Edsel Ford
marching band’s bass drum, snares, and brass
over the din of traffic on Outer Drive this morning
with the west wind at my back.
If this is pep—banal, monosyllabic, metaphysical—
I’ll un-stopper it and put it in my step
before kicking fallen sugar maple leaves.
That school’s namesake takes a belt
of Cutty Sark for how woefully he’s been
forgotten and composes a letter to James Couzens
with fountain pen by lamplight.
If, like Ford and Couzens, I had a freeway
named after me, if it were a ’38 Lincoln Zephyr
I was retrieving, my car with its silly domed roof
and balding tires and my friend Ren
wouldn’t be in the Bar 342 parking lot
when I walked up, and there would be more
to do than wait for the door
of that windowless cinderblock building to open.