weh-weh, dicen entre dientes
ah-weeeee! lloran
pajarillos enojados
me dejan tirarlos
lanzarlos a la libertad del cielo
para encontrar sus huevos
no eclosionados y robarselos
de los cerdos verdes
Odio a los cerdos, sus hocicos
se ríen de mi, de las perdidas innumerables
que tiroteo
los intentos de rescate, seguire rompiendo
cajas, ollas de oro, cubos de hielo
hasta que todos quedemos
libres

There is the whole street of short white houses around Rosewood Park and its flat pool, where there are only hushed radios, usually tuned to the A.M. radio station playing rancheras until you’re homesick, and you don’t know for what. There is one song you can hear, and Homero, the owner of the CD player sits close to it, looking at The Smiths poster curling from the window where he taped it.

It’s so easy to laugh, it’s so easy to hate, it takes guts to be gentle and kind, he sings and repeats the words popping from the ink on the poster, the band emerging from a blue street in Manchester, the East LA of England.   Homero has felt this way many times before. Jenny tells him some fucked up reason why he’s not good enough for her and she’ll wait a couple of days for his hurt to stop wailing, for him to stop crying (because he does this, on the phone with her and in notes he writes in scribbled capital letters, smeared in places by salt and beating his head against the paper).  And who can blame him? He’s a man, he has feelings, but this Jenny only wants him to have feelings for her, not about her. On Monday they had talked.

He said, “I love you, Jenny.”
She said, “You’re too young to be in love.”
He said, ——.
She said, “Why? Is it because you make me tapes?”
He said, ——.
She said, “You like me, but you’re not in love. Don’t be so immature.”
He said, “Well, I am, even if you don’t believe me.”

To read the complete story go to Ana Castillo’s, La Tolteca E-zine:

http://tolteca.anacastillo.com/content/

tus hojas verdes ya estaban secas por tanta luz,

de ser rodeadas por esa constante cantidad de electricidad

Tu pierna larga y nueva, ondulada como caireles de mujeres aristócratas,

una serie de huevos de madera atravesados por una lagrima de árbol viejo

Cuando primero llegaste de Europa

Te fui a encontrar en la plana baja de un almacén blanco y muy Swedish

A tu alrededor habían sillones rojos y cuadrados, sabanas de algodón blanco

imprentas con fleur de lis anaranjadas

Lámparas de cristales  rectangulares colgaban cerca de ti

Pero no te fijabas en ellas

Te decías entre si, “¿Qué tiene que ver el esplendor cristalino con poder

leer un buen libro bajo mis ramas bordadas sobre mi gorrito de muselina?”

Así fue y me enamore de ti, de tu luz calientita que me vijila

Cásate conmigo, te propuse

Y te compré

No. Te robé

Te metí en una bolsa negra y te puse en mi cajuela,

como en los tiempos de mi abuelita, como en los tiempos del libre comercio

cuando inmigrantes Chinos construían camisetas con banderas Americanas sobre las olas del Pacifico sin país que los viera

Cuando primero te traje a casa, te esperaba mi sillón negro donde escribo teorías

sobre como amar a los niños de la manera adecuada—

dentro de su cultura y con consciencia del privilegio

Todos los dias aquí me acompañan tu y el sillón

Cuando se me van las ganas de escribir  y cuando no le regreso la llamada ni a Lady Gaga

en ves de abrir las paginas de mi computadora

saco y te leo mis libros de sapos verdes y los tacos de nube,

de princesa y de adas madrinas, de codornices endemoniados

que se comen a los que no me quieren con mini-mordidas hasta matarlos

Oh, lamparita de hojas verdes y pierna de café

Quédate conmigo o siempre lloraré

Quédate conmigo o nunca he de ver

Quédate conmigo y quítame mi sed

It’s 1985 and Jenny’s neighborhood liquor store is called Dixie Farms, the last lingering of Dust Bowl families who lived in Maywood the generation before. The new wave of mostly Mexican working class immigrants pushed them out like they push put chiriones who cut in line, nicely and with a tap on the shoulder, motioning to move to the back, please. The yearbooks at the high school went from Billies to Margaritas between ‘79 to ‘81. A new market called El Rancho, five blocks from Dixie Farms, is where Doña Amada gets her legumes and Jenny gets her pickled pork skins as she holds her father’s hand.

Purple blossoms fall on the ground along Loveland Street that pop-pop when you step on them along the little house street. Along Loveland is where our story now sleeps. Some of the houses are owned, mostly rented, yellow, peach, stucco, with giant rose gardens and screaming kids, dirt yards and dead cars, more cars than people, just like the rest of LA. In this place there are not enough ways to get out in a fire, and too many ways to get in to steal.

This little plot of land, this little corner of concrete next to the freeway and flowers is where Jenny lives.

The skinny boy crossed the Amazon in his flat boat. He ducked beneath the bottom sky of the violinist’s gaze. The invisible border of where two bodies could join to make a third. The boy walked under it to hand over the dragon fruit, wrapped in a letter.

Dragon fruit are the violinist’s favorite fruit to paint and eat – they taste like baby pear, their million seeds crushing one another, sifting the chalky white skin onto his tongue.

He will thank the young boy and pay him a few pesos for his delivery. He unravels the fruit from its package, another poem from Adia across the river. If only he weren’t afraid of river water he could talk to her in person, see her through his grid sight. She writes a sonnet about her two pigs Petra and Ezra, how they like to eat tomatoes when it’s hot and yams when it rains. They all sleep in the same barn, but the people lie upstairs.

The dragon fruit to one side on his desk.

*

Querido,

I drive a good stock truck. The bed holds a rubber tree I took down earlier today. I wish I could swim or find a way across this mass of water between us. I miss when your letters don’t come, when it rains or the boy is sick. My hands fold the lace napkins into squares, no lined paper to touch, no words to graze on.

Won’t you sail once to be with me? The broken, silty bottom will not touch your feet, I promise. You’ll only fee the weight of the water under the rowboat, feel the cool as you float to my side of the river.

I hope you are writing a new song for me and that you are still taking walks along the bank. I hope we never run out of paper.

Love,

Adia

my dad’s childhood toys rattle:

a stick, a rock

Pápi learned to read at 18

Only sand in his wallet

Then he trotted over the line

To make me

And buy Fords

Dad and I like to fly Off

new dirt roads, food, women, heat, beer

along the Pacific shore

I appreciate the silver fine-ness of his hair

Tip toe around the two-house earth he carved out of sleep

Hover over pop’s courage

What he did with it first: defend his mother

What last: swallowed it down with grain alcohol

He dreams still in mosquito nets, the drumming fate

abandoned doorways echo all the steps not taken

Across the border, filmy portraits of his mother

she nudges her dead husband with hanging eyes

“Viejo- Look how he turned out

Shouldn’t have left him”

There’s nothing left but what’s left

Down the road she goes,

the other pretty daughter

A doppelganger she is not

Straight, cropped black hair, smudged eyeliner

Hummingbirds, She and me

Different noses, same father

There is no map for the nausea of a half sister

If I drove, to say the first hello

I’d trip across all the roads in Tecate

I cannot enter what is not my house

Dad and I like to fly off and out of trees

Why are we the same?

Yo con mis alas y el también

Nuestra fruta descargada y dulce

]]> http://vertiz.wordpress.com/2008/08/06/fruit/feed/ 0 Vickie Vertiz http://vertiz.wordpress.com/2008/07/23/amada/ http://vertiz.wordpress.com/2008/07/23/amada/#comments Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:58:37 +0000 Vickie Vertiz http://vertiz.wordpress.com/?p=18 Continue reading →]]> Her name is Amada. You’d think that’s exactly what she was all her life. Sixteen and wearing a dress the color of butter, Amada and her blue eyes walked to the bakery with her sister Antonia every night. Mexico favors eyes a color other than brown.  Their mother favored names starting with the letter ‘A.’ Amada holds her sister’s hand on the walk around the corner from their house; it’s how they were raised to be with each other, educadas. Amada would long for her younger sister’s hand on her last days, when she wanted someone to put a pillow over her face and send her to heaven, her eyes slowly clouding, heart sputtering along.

The pan dulce trip was special this night; the bread was a small merienda to hold them over for the big dance that night. She knew Fidel would be there. Amada had glanced at him once.  They were at the bakery, he and his mother, picking out cuernos, yo-yos, and Amada had not been introduced and pretended she didn’t see them at all; better to feign innocence than get caught being afraid. And she was afraid, but she wasn’t sure of what.

Amada’s favorite pan dulce are marranitos, cinnamon, pig-shaped cookies, kind of. She cringes at saying their name to the panadero, but, she loves how the bread crumbles into the glass of hot milk; she dangles it carefully away from her dress and watches a dainty piece of the bread drop. You see, it’s perfectly acceptable for bread to crumble all over the kitchen table, just not on your dress.

1950 was kind to her family. The food store did so well that she got pearls for her quinceañera the year before. They did so well that her family began to frequent the formal dances at city hall, with all the other familias decentes. This night, as she walked in with her parents and sister, she was very careful when shaking Fidel’s hand at the front door: no direct eye contact and not too many teeth in her smile. Fidel was, after all the Presidente Municipal’s only son, and the best dancer of all the young men.  He held his had out to her, “Fidel Hernandez de Navarro, a sus ordenes. Bienvenida, Señorita Amada.” The crinoline liquefied underneath her dress. Her grandmother had warned Amada to keep her legs together at all times, no matter what, and especially in the company of a young man. But Amada never understood what she meant until that instant, and she couldn’t help it. When Fidel cradled her hand with both of his, her thighs parted, just enough to let the Matamoros breeze through her dress. She would forget this feeling once they were married. She could only see their screaming babies and the insufferable maid who couldn’t clean anything right. She would miss Fidel when he died, his side of the bed left a hueco she wished something would fill.

Amada was the most beautiful girl in San Martín. It was an up and coming town with well to-do families and good schools, where girls like her were getting the chance to study corte y confección, a liberal practice at the time, some might say.

1988 is not as kind, but not so bad.  Amada likes to tell her dance stories to her friend Irene and her daughter, Rosa. Amada’s own daughters aren’t interested in hearing them anymore, or as Irene might say to Rosa in a whisper, “No la pelan las hijas malagradecidas.” Amada met Irene at Rosa’s elementary school. Amada volunteers there during the day, helping to cut construction paper into geometric shapes of different sizes.

On one visit to Irene’s house, she picks up a marranito, dips it carefully and eats it in secret delight. Amada likes to tell Irene not to sit cross-legged on the floor, “No te sientes asi. Si te sientas asi, te habres.”  Oh, Rosa says, Gracias, Doña Amada.  Irene doesn’t quite understand what Amada means, Why is it bad to stretch your legs wide, to open yourself? That’s how they teach me to sit in class.  Amada’s afraid Irene will open too soon like she did that night at the dance.

Fidel didn’t see the wind graze her thighs and move her dress away from her body. When they danced later that night, he knew she would let him do whatever he wanted to her. Her eyes gave her away, blue and blank. She might be the prettiest girl in town, but he was a good dancer; his moves would never age and pucker. He knew she would hold that night as the symbol of their love until he died.  This was the picture and feeling that would keep her alive when he would leave to Los Angeles to work, gone for months and a year once, laying down with whores. When he’d return, he’d ask Amada to do those new things he learned to him in their old bed. He knew she would do them because she had to. Where else would she go? What else would she do?

These days, all Amada does is sit and have marranitos and instant coffee at Irene’s house. Not a single baile in sight. Her dress the color of butter, long ago given away to a pobrecita in San Martín, with no good luck and no education.

She picked up a blazer embroidered with pink and green sequins.

“Get this and tell Carlos I made you buy it!”

I would have bought it too, but it wasn’t gathered in the small of the back how I like my jackets. That shit was too Golden Girls, even for me. But when in Rose Nilan country, do as Rose would- so instead I bought a see-through black flapper dress and red candy drop earrings. My homie bought cashmere sweaters and a broken brass necklace. Though we were lamenting our depression over our forked road careers, we were not so sad that we could not enjoy accessories.

We drove down Lake Street on a slushie of road. I spotted the Mexican and Ethiopian food and paycheck joints. The buildings are lovely brick and white wood-framed. Rows of casitas with enclosed porches, galoshes at the front door, and oval shaped verandas. Who said Minnesota isn’t pretty?

We had ourselves a meaty Tibetan meal in Minneapolis. We were in a flurry of snow globe drift and baby hail, taking sips of straight up martinis and pink rum.

My friend goes, “I want more olives, girl. Am I pushy? I always ask for too much.”

The waiter brought her another speared row of olives. She popped another in her mouth and said law school took her spirit.

“Snatch that shit back, girl! It’s just that it’s not spring here yet,” I said, “Just wait until the blossoms come. Then see what you want to do next. Look at me girl, I was semi semi suicidal like a month ago and now, I’m in love. Wait til the rain breaks.”

“Yeah,” she said and ate another olive.

Crushing hard and semi in love put a stopper on last year’s depression.  That, and my face was experiencing dryness from all the crying. I’m currently spreading the tears over my life, like maple butter, instead of freezing it into a hard rectangle of margarine over my lungs.

Self-generated sorrow not withstanding, academia can really erase you and make you doubt why you ever went to college or grad school in the first place, especially working class students of color. School can convince us that we are not good enough and that our English is just as bad (or good, and people are always surprised?!), when in fact, we, the immigrants and refugees running from our families and first-world bullets, are the best chance we’ve got. My homie’s Hmong family keeps no secrets, reading each others’ diaries without asking but never talk about them. And mine: the Mexicanos who write their secrets into thirsty songs for every guey to know.

The hail got bigger and our ex- novio talk faded. Nos despedimos. As pretty as it was, the snow was enough to make me sleepy and by then, the new love in my life was done, and the ex talk could go on forever.

As we sat in her car in the parking lot of my hotel, I offered to fix her necklace.

“I’ll mail it to you, nerd. But come and visit me soon in California,” I said.

“I’m moving to San Jose next month!” she said. And we were glad, but I had to go.  Some viejos take lifetimes to get over. I couldn”t wait that long to walk home.