Last Year's Things


Letter to Carolyn Forche'

You said you brought back poetry to your country,
and it was worth nothing, it wasn't bread,
just words.
You questioned how long it takes for one voice
to reach another,
and after 30 years, from El Salvador
to your return here,
in America,
I'm listening.
With 18 promising years shoved away
in a pair of Mary Jane's buried in my closet, 
I found your words without any directions
while I ready myself to leave.
The torture and poverty I have seen through your eyes
grind at my back
and poke through the soles of my feet,
reminding me that I'm doing nothing
but wearing clean clothes, drinking coffee
brewed from a new Black and Decker pot,
and leaning into the armrest of a couch,
reading your poems.


Full Carts

I have seen clones of mothers, herding their children
through aisles of the grocery store,
in velour tracksuits with designer handbags slung
over their shoulders or propped up in the child's cart seat.
They sift through envelopes of coupons
and complain to that empty spot on the shelf
that their favorite type of canned tomatoes isn't in stock.
I have listened to the sighs of husbands
holding plastic baskets for their wives,
whining that there isn't any blackberry yogurt left,
and blueberry or peach just won't do.
I've seen hundreds of customers
bumping into each other and rattling through the store
like cattle being led to slaughter,
trampling each other for that last breath of air,
that last can of vegetables on sale.
I want to shake their shoulders
and ask them if they know about the children in Africa,
the tiny skeletons in Somalia that don't have fresh water,
who drink parasites from mud puddles
because there isn't a well for miles.
I want to ask them about the children in Burma,
who are caught in the midst of a civil war
with their palms outstretched,
begging for anything to eat.
The customers don't know about Burma or Somalia,
they don't want to know,
so what can they do
but complain about a store only carrying
New World Style Tuttorosso canned tomatoes,
and not Italian Style with Basil?



Awake

My mother called me at midnight.
I didn't want to pick up
because you were still softly kissing my neck.
I rolled over anyway and groped for the phone on the rug.
She told me of receipts she found
in the wastebasket of my father's rifle room
for roses he had bought for another woman.
She asked me to return home,
to watch my sleeping sister
while she drove to catch him in the rendezvous.
She cried into the mouthpiece when I told her
I was in your apartment,
lying next to you on an air mattress.

She hung up,
and I turned to you, sobbing,
not because of my father's fault-
that I had already known-
but for my own mistake of leaving my mother
alone, without her oldest daughter.

I held onto you for the night
and watched the bulbs of light in the streetlamps flicker
outside though the slats of the fire escape.
Morning rose;
I didn't know this because of the light that woke us up
through the window you hadn't bought a curtain for yet,
or the way your arm was still wrapped around my hips.
I knew because you and I went to the grocery store then,
and we picked up a 4-dollar bouquet of spray roses
for my mother. She was solemn at first,
staring at our gift with contempt and a pinched mouth,
but after you left
she and I sat on the front porch of the house,
sipping wine together in thick glasses.
Then I knew,
because she laughed at the bouquet, and I joined her
as we watched my father's truck pull into the drive.


19

In the calm hours of the deadened morning,
my mother, Lore', whimpers with somber eyes and pursed lips,
bent from the silence she would defend herself in
from my father who was holed up in our basement,
clinging to a small heater and torn blankets,
while my mother hunches over a plate of salmon, untouched,
and pulls her glass of White Merlot and flannel robe nearer.
Without her husband at the table, she couldn't gnaw
at the rosy film of meat from the fish.
Her meals were prepared for him, too.

She had complained to him that he slept too much,
and when company was rarely over, his head would loll
in the back of his reclining chair, and he conversed with guests
in intermittent snores. He growled and snapped at her
when she nudged him to wake.
Now he only hibernates at night, two floors below,
and dreads the morning when he and my mother
share an uneasy passing glance.

She whispers to the house that she won't surrender it
and ascends to her room, to her bed and finds my sister asleep,
curled up in a comforter, a small cub in a large den,
grinding her teeth and twitching in a nightmare.
My mother pulls the damp strands of hair from my sister's forehead;
her jaw relaxes. My mother thought of construction paper
drawings he hung with clothespins on the wall, the seat covers
she made for the deck chairs, the paisley curtains she sewed, the paint,
wallpaper and fingerprints she smeared
on the white drywall of her home;
she told the sleeping child to hush.
My sister's thumb found her mouth, and the house was silent.


Devil's Game

In my aunt's beach house that sidles up against the lagoons,
I tapped letter tiles on her dining room table
and looked over  the spinning Scrabble board at the pointed face of Lucifer,
looking through my aunt and my sister's tiny wooden shelves.
My turn spun to me, and Lucifer snapped his fingers,
drawing the glass door's blinds shut with a click,
and I lost sight of the water outside.
He sighed and smoke blew from his nose like car exhaust.
I had only six letters left and nowhere to fit them,
so I nudged them before the word 'meal' on the board,
hoping that no one would challenge 'clovenmeal'
and think that it was some kind of meat that was cleaved at the fat veins
or a pork chop that was pushed through a grinder.
Lucifer tilted his head and blinked at me,
silently asking how I could be so silly.
He lifted a watch from the top of a tacky Hawaiian shirt
and announced that he had to be somewhere, but before he left
he told me my word didn't exist, and, it being Easter Sunday,
neither did giant rabbits who put together dollar-store baskets.
I stared at the blinds he closed and heard his castanet walk to the front door,
and as he turned the handle he said the priest at mass today lied too,
that all sins weren't forgiven if you believed in the name of Jesus.
It was just a name, after all.
I pulled on the looped cord of the blinds and tugged them along the track,
trying to see the waves in the wake of a fishing boat docking across the way
and ignore him,
but I knew he was right about every lie.