Poetry 365

The day my girl is lost for an hour,
the day I think she is gone forever and then I find her,
I sit with her a while and then I
go to the corner store for orange juice for her
lips, tongue, palate, throat,
stomach, blood, every gold cell of her body.
I joke around with the guy behind the counter, I
walk out into the winter air and
weep. I know he would never hurt her,
would never take her body in his hands to
crack it or crush it, would keep her safe and
bring her home to me. Yet there are
those who would. I pass the huge
cockeyed buildings, massive as prisons,
charged, loaded, cocked with people,
some who would love to take my girl, to un-
do her, fine strand by fine
strand. These are buildings full of rope,
ironing boards, sash, wire,
iron cords wove in black-and-blue spirals like
umbilici, apartments supplied with
razor blades and lye. This is my
quest, to know where it is, the evil in the
human heart. As I walk home I
look in face after face for it, I
see the dark beauty, the rage, the
grown-up children of the city she walks as a
child, a raw target. I cannot
see a soul who would do it. I clutch the
jar of juice like a cold heart,
remembering the time my parents tied me to a chair and
would not feed me and I looked up
into their beautiful faces, my stomach a
bright mace, my wrists like birds the
shrike has hung up by the throat from barbed wire, I
gazed as deep as I could into their eyes
and all I saw was goodness, I could not get past it.
I rush home with the blood of oranges
pressed to my breast, I cannot get it to her fast enough.

Stars through the windshield glinted,
shrunken, delirious as the eyes
of sharks. I heard mother’s
heart (my head
cradled in her elbow’s
crook) chant faster, and father
tramped down the pedal
when his lane was clear. Later,

lungs drowning in my chest, I sucked
at oxygen fresh from a tank. Thin
voices leaked in, trembling
the tent’s wrinkled,
transparent skin. My mother’s
face was a pale smear on the air,
her jacket a haggard ghost. “Doctor,’

father said. (I remembered his brown
palms, coarser than emery cloth
on my back, circling slowly
to draw insomnia from my blood;
the fat scar barnacled on
his thumb would whisper
along my ribs: A man becomes
all that he’s lost.) He rasped,
“Doctor…will he die?” I let

go: he hiss of piped air drowned
his answer. And when I came to,
they were gone. Bones of cold light
flickered above my bed; hot urine
eeled between my legs and froze;
fins, in my fever’s depth, ripped
through swelling tides of sleep:

the blackness swallowed its stars.

A process in the weather of the heart
Turns damp to dry; the golden shot
Storms in the freezing tomb.
A weather in the quarter of the veins
Turns night to day; blood in their suns
Lights up the living worm.

A process in the eye forewarns
The bones of blindness; and the womb
Drives in a death as life leaks out.

A darkness in the weather of the eye
Is half its light; the fathomed sea
Breaks on unangled land.
The seed that makes a forest of the loin
Forks half its fruit; and half drops down,
Slow in a sleeping wing.

A weather in the flesh and bone
Is damp and dry; the quick and dead
Move like two ghosts before the eye.

A process in the weather of the world
Turns ghost to ghost; each mothered child
Sits in their double shade.
A process blows the moon into the sun,
Pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin;
And the heart gives of its dead.

here is another bone to pick with you
o mother whose bones i worry for scraps,
nobody warned me about daughters;
how they bewitch you into believing
you have thrown off a pot that is yourself
then one night you creep into their rooms and
their faces have hardened into odd flowers
their voices are choosing in foreign elections and
their legs are open to strange unwieldy men.

We remove a hand…
In a roomful of smoky man names burnished dull black
And labelled “blue” the din drifted in…
Someone said “Blake-blues” and someone else “pull-head”
Meaning bloodhounds. Someone shovelled in some
Cotton-field money brave free beer and finally “Negroes!”
They talked…
He thought of overshoes looked like mother
Made him
Combed his hair
Put away your hair. Books shall speak of us
When we are gone, like soft, dark scarves in gay April.
Let them discard loved in the Spring search! We
Await a grass in hand.

2. Heritage

Don’t you steal that flag, my Mama had qualms
But a boy gotta have something to boast on
Crack that rock, slit that toad
Nature’s a hoot if you shoot your load

Flies in the oven
Flies in the head
I’ll kill that fly
Till I kill it dead
And no more will that fly
Bother me
As I roam and I ramble
In the tumbleweed

3. Tough Love

My dad and I were very close
I like to say, int’mately gruff:
We hunted bear, skinned slithy toes
You know, played ball and all that stuff.
Daddy had his pride and maybe was aloof
But when he hit me, that was proof—
Proof he cared
More than he could ever share.
How I hated those men who took him away!
Pop was a passionate man
Just like me
And I’ll teach my son, Clem
To love just like we men.

He said in his mother’s house, growing up…

Poem removed by request of publisher/copyright holder

The poem “Wallpaper” by Julia Alvarez is available to read in The Body Electric: America’s Best Poets from The American Poetry Review, edited by Stephen Berg, David Bonanno and Arthur Vogelsang.

When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.

It was soon after my mother died,
a brilliant June day,
everything blooming.

I sat on a gray stone bench
in a lovingly planted garden,
but the lilies were as deaf
as the ears of drunken sleepers
and the roses curved inward.
Nothing was black or broken
and not a leave fell
and the sun blared endless commercials
for summer holidays.

I sat on a gray stone bench
ringed with ingenue faces
of pink and white impatiens
and placed my grief
on the mouth of language,
the only thing that would grieve with me.

to fold the clothes. No matter who lives
or who dies, I’m still a woman.
I’ll always have plenty to do.
I bring the arms of his shirt
together. Nothing can stop
our tenderness. I’ll get back
to the poem. I’ll get back to being
a woman. But for now
there’s a shirt, a giant shirt
in my hands, and somewhere a small girl
standing next to her mother
watching to see how it’s done.

I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,

prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,

and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst,
compared to your forgiveness of it

already given. And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,

where, for that, the leaves are,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.