Status Updates From Alabanza: New and Selected ...

317
Undressing tamales steamed in the husk, we remembered parking at the
corner of La Revolución and La Constitución,
two avenues that never intersect.
So we walked among the herds
of beer-loud college boys from San Diego, stripjoint shills testifying to
glory like Jesus had returned as a woman sliding naked down a pole,
beggars in traffic shedding their fingerprints to blossom in a field of shut
windows

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Sometimes I dream
my father is a guitar, with a hole in his chest where the music throbs
between my fingers.

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Your poems were subversive angels born in the sky,
an insurrection of sunflowers,
a goddess of fireflies,
a hurricane of persecuted stars, a river rising on your lover’s tongue.
When children drowned in the fires of tenement wiring,
or poets burned their intestines with alcohol to collapse on some deserted
beach of East Harlem sidewalk, you sang the poems till your hands
cramped in their fists.

At night,
with my wife
sitting on the bed,
I turn from her
to unbuckle
my belt
so she won’t see
her father
unbuckling
his belt

A light flipped on in the kitchen at night
revealed a Republican National Convention of roaches,
an Indianapolis 500 of roaches.
One night I dreamed a giant roach
leaned over me,
brushing my face with kind antennae and whispering I love you.
I awoke slapping myself and watched the darkness for hours,
because I realized this was a dream
and so that meant
the cockroach did not really love me.

this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers, stove-hot, blister the fingers of raging
cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;

this is the yearthat darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly with the apologizing descendants of their
executioners.

the prostitute swollen
with pregnancy and sobbing as the landlady
sneers miscarriage before a judge
poking his broken hearing aid; the girl surrounded by a pleading carousel of
children, in Spanish bewilderment, sleepless and rat-vigilant, who wins
reluctant extermination but loses the youngest, lead paint retarded; the
man alcohol-puffed, graph of scars
stretching across his belly, locked out,

For years afterward, the boy marveled at an island where the people drank
Coca-Cola and sang jingles from World War II in a language they did not
speak, while so many coconuts in the trees sagged heavy with milk,
swollen and unsuckled.

Cheo saw an angel on Division Street today: wandering the block
in the wrong gang colors, condemned by a sickle of inquisitors, baptized in
gasoline, purified with a match, shrieking angel, burning heretic, brilliant
crucifix thrown through a skylight on the roof.
And when the chorus of glass exploded in crescendo, Cheo heard the angel
say: I am the heat that will flush your face, I am the sweat of your skin

In the school auditorium, the Theodore Roosevelt statue is nostalgic
for the Spanish-American war, each fist lonely for a saber or the reins of
anguish-eyed horses, or a podium to clatter with speeches glorying in the
malaria of conquest.
But now the Roosevelt school is pronounced Hernández.
Puerto Rico has invaded Roosevelt with its army of Spanish-singing
children in the hallways,

between the white walls of the hacienda,
a racing Taíno heart frantic as if hearing the bellowing god of gunpowder
for the first time.
The colibrí becomes pure stillness, seized in the paralysis of the prey,

The name has dissolved, obscured in a century of storms that asphyxiated
shacks with mud, yanking
the stone vertebrae from bridges.
On the cross,
the dark absence of Christ spreads and hangs, a crucified shadow where
thieves
tore the brass body down, leaving amputated feet and hands still nailed,
and the accidental dead without a guide
on the mountain roads of the underworld.

candles a reminder of the wakes
too many and too soon,
the frustrated prayers and pleading with saints,
in memoriam for generations of sacrificed
blood warm as the wax sticking to their fingers,
and years of broken streetlamps,
bowed with dark eyes,
where addiction’s hunger waits nervously.
Over the wooden box,
a woman’s face was slick in a drizzle of tears.
Her hand dropped coins like seed

A rosary tattoo
between thumb
and forefinger
means that
every handful
of crops and dirt
is a prayer,
means that Christ
had hard hands
too

A junkie is going to the place where secrets
are auctioned into slavery and shadows
sell the darkness to each other.

Here, adrift in the undertow of that darkness, down in night’s black
whirlpool, his brother
will not know where to find him.

mexicano, dominicano, guatemalteco, puertorriqueño,
orphans and travelers, refused permission to use gas station toilets,
beaten for a beer in unseen towns with white porches, or evaporated
without a tombstone in the peaceful grass, a centipede of hands moving,
hands clutching infants that grieve, fingers to the crucifix,
hands that labor