on one side, backyards treed
with barbeques and sheds on the other,
the canyon flourishes with cenotaphs
of reddened tin and grey wood.
With nothing but time, crops
of bottles and chicken bones,
thrown from the freeway,
stretch upward restlessly
in the six by nine of sun.
4.
When ice cream was
the only bribe needed
to tell my grandmother
my cousins walked
the canyons to meet
with their boyfriends,
I should have asked
for a soda, too.
When I leaned against a fence,
playing with a chicken bone
breaking with cracks from the sun,
when only me and a recliner’s bones
or the bleached skull of a plastic bag
could be seen, I could’ve
panted in some heat, too.
At nine, I had no language for lonely,
but could watch cars swim laps forever.
The fence shared a common tongue,
but had no place to go,
if it no longer liked where
it lived, could not move
to my neighborhood,
where we were
racist neighbors,
suspicious of strange fences,
where cars piled in our dirt yard,
and no one listened to the pink
seat of a swing as it licked
the ground with only one chain.
5.
I was two
in a ruffled blue tuxedo
when Donna Thomas
and David Martinez
exchanged vows
and traded rings.
In a decade
their marriage misfired,
their hearts stopped
spinning and roses
rising from vases
slouched.
My grandmother grew
roses and cactus
on the side of her house;
in a front yard of dirt
grew half-sanded cars
blooming with Bondo.
On the porch,
I listened to my grandfather
sing in a rusted tongue.
His sharpest tool was tomorrow.
The ice cream man’s song
was my jam;
I’d jump the low,
leaning fence surrounding the yard,
slapping the light pole as I went by.
At night, young men
huddled under the yellow light,
their pants sagging,
their homemade tattoos
thickening with age.
I laughed at how
their underwear in jowls
hung past their belt,
at the broken belt loops
toothed with dirt.
Me and my primas played
under the kitchen light,
our bodies bumping against the table,
tipping the chilies and spilling the salt.
Outside, blue and red rotated
on the sheet over the window,
the tied ends on the curtain rod
flickered like Christmas
while cruisers converged
and black men ran and slid
across hoods. When
everyone was braceleted,
cops talked into their shoulders
in squawks and pauses,
picked up the spilled pockets
and tipped-over bottles,
laughing as they nudged
the boys against
the hoods of their cars.
6.
I shall wear my Chuck Taylors
beige guts aglow,
crease my khakis
to a sharp shank.
I will swing first
or shoot my mouth
at any tremble
of trouble.
