Issue #54


Authors

Listen

Listen. 

You, tank top, rosary, boxers, 

sharing the covers with two of your cousins. The girls get the other bed. 

Uncle Bobby gets the couch 

AJ 

the living room floor. 

The window is open 

but only because it's seventy degrees And the dog’ll scare away intruders. Police sirens, cars cruising, 

cutting 

through the night 

people drinking, 

smoking, dealing, 

Flood in 

past the blanket-drapes 

pinned to the wall by tacs. 

You listen to the wind 

wrapping 

around the black boys outside 

the little Arab boy walking his dog You can’t sleep 

Someone yells in Spanish. 

It could be anyone. 

Someone responds with “N*gga, shut up.” They keep talking 

*** 

The street in the evening

 

flooded with Cumbia and men 

women who dance endlessly 

in and out of lights 

street lights flicker

like faces in and out of focus 

Back alleys with wife beaters 

Crosses on top of bark-colored skin 

tick-tack of bachata 

crackled laughs like 

broken Corona bottles, Tecate cans 

crushed into the pavement 

Never let me sleep 

I say to you 

You pray over me 

music falling in through the window 

warm breeze and shouts 

of other mexicans below 

our people in the streets 

I can’t sleep, I say 

as you murmur prayers into my chest, 

kiss the rosary into my skin, 

press the night into my skin, 

it’s okay, you say, 

you don’t have to 

*** 

Summer is heavy here. Thick. 

Ecstatic. Buzzing with the heat 

that sleeps above the covers. 

Humidity that seeps into the walls. 

No clothes. 

Just boxers and cold showers. 

Bachata all night 

in front of the chain-link fences 

Bottles break, clink. 11 P.M. Men yell. Girls laugh. The unspoken music. 

Little kids run. I don’t sleep.

*** 

He lives down the street. 

Little Mexico. 

Where we all live.  

Everyone in work boots, hair nets, XXL t-shirts Living Earth. History in our bones. 

He has weed on his breath. Hands like soap. Lighter than I thought. Too soft. 

I grab his zipper. 

Grab like lightning 

scorching the Earth. 

Come like thunder. 

Lost in the chain-link of the neighborhood. We hear the men teeter. 

Down the street 

people still live in Summer. 

Summer is thick 

around us. 

Hands too hot, 

too soft, 

threaded in my hair. 

*** 

This street was Mexican once. 

He says into the bottle 

at his lips. 

The sun burning 

the pavement. 

The Earth is on fire. 

White families live here now. 

We’re the only ones left. 

Crisp brown. 

Hot as the Earth. 

***

Exquisite bodies 

of stone. 

Hands like machines. 

Oiled wrists. 

Joints in tandem. 

The people like me only exist here. Next to empty bottles in the street. Static of the night. 

No love is made 

before dawn. 

Low murmur of men. 

Mass in the morning. 

I sleep 

through it.

A Specter Haunting Europe

the phalange twins