Paul’s Reviews > Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982-2002 > Status Update

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.

262
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.

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.