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.