El Monte
El Monte, California, circa 1978.
A crowd of yapping Chihuahuas
clamor around the gate,
apricot trees drop fruit to the ground,
rows of birds nest in cages:
parakeets, cockatiels, minas, canaries.
Our summer camp is Grandma’s yard:
the ruffled meanderings of chickens and ducks,
bird and dog scat, brown and green patches of grass
turned to sink holes by industrious moles.
A cloud of doves ebb and flow.
Mom drops us off at Grandma’s
where we swing from tree branches,
burrow in an abandoned car,
where JJ tosses a chicken in the sky,
where Alexandra has streaks in her hair
and she’s poured bleach on her jeans
to make them more abstract.
We take turns on a tire swing
under the world-weary gaze
Of Piplina, the eldest Chihuahua,
and our English is better than our Spanish,
so what I understand about Grandma is no bigger
than this summer patch
of animal husbandry and decomposition.
That, and the fact that she has a doll collection
more prodigious than my own.
When I outgrow my dolls, I give them to her:
she always has room for another.
Columbus, Ohio, 2015.
I unpack the porcelain doll that Grandma kept for me.
She told my mother, Esa se parece a Paloma.
Grandma has knit her a coral dress
that fits her smartly.
I don’t know where to put it amongst my things,
since I did not inherit from my Grandmother
a penchant for the stockpiling of dolls and birds,
and yet every room of my house
teams with evidence of her endeavors:
wooden boxes painted with El Moro de San Juan,
stones painted like cats,
a needlepoint wall hanging of a tree in the fall,
a crocheted pillow the shape of a heart.
She knew how to nurse a fallen baby sparrow back to health.
She knew how to clean the floor with herbs and camphor oil
when a man clears out.
Her life was a hard thing to compass,
her mysteries and motives.
It was always a secret with her,
the twenty dollars she tucks into your hand
when no one else is looking,
a private pact, like something stolen.
I want to say we’ll always know
where to put the things she gave us,
but that would be too easy.
I need to leave the words un-tucked,
where untold stories rattle and wheeze
as the imperfect stewards of unpacked boxes:
the things that weren’t finished.
July
In a midnight blue convertible Fiat with beige upholstery pocked with seasons of cigarette burns the sweat gathers underneath our thighs and leaves small puddles where we have sat. We tear down the pulsing veins of tar, interlaced helixes by which Aztec deities ascend and descend to celestial and infernal planes and the roach is lit with the red end of the button that pops out of the dash and the day is brown and it becomes time for swearing. Swearing, this time, never to set foot inside a church again. He means the kind of church where Grandma goes, the kind where they sell tamales outside and rows of repentant cholas pack themselves into white blouses.
You would for a pretty lady, I observe. He laughs as he thinks about the way he is and then concedes that yes, yes he would.
In the basement apartment at Grandma’s there are blue chip stamps for us to moisten on a sponge lying in a bowl of tap water. An out-of-tune piano sits on an avocado green shag rug.
He has a date so Grandma comes down to watch us and she sits transfixed at the end of the putty colored recliner riddled with seasons of cigarette burns and says things in tongues at the television set where Linda Blair rotates her head in 360 degree angles. Grandma acts like the people in the movie are in the living room. She speaks in tongues at it. He flips on his tie and puts on the Thrifty’s aftershave that she bought him for his birthday along with the extra long shoehorn from Florsheim that we use to chase after cucarachas. A rusting fan looks around the room.
I ask him the question Grandpa told me to ask. I say, “If God didn’t build the earth, then who did?” “Chicanos,” he says. In my mind these Chicanos swing pick axes and trip on anvils and husk tamales alongside buckets of hot rivets, dangling sandaled feet from I-beams, drinking Budweiser and rooting for
Fernando Valenzuela because it is July as they conceive tectonic plates and decide how many species of marsupials should hop across the western sphere.
Chicano dogs bark plaintive remarks into predawn hours. I know these are Chicano dogs because of the lilt with which they speak, Chicano as the unwilling audience of their vigil who shouts, Hey Moreno shut your dogs up.
Chicanos raise fists and climb trees and jump on the policeman. They watch Tower of Power at the Street Scene and shout cheeeeeooow out the window of the car and when I ask Carmen why does that she says, Because it hurts.
(All Poems: Copyright, Paloma Martinez-Cruz©)