Sevillanas

Never mind the heat spell, querida,

she said when I arrived on the 10 o’clock bus.

There were still tangles in my hair and sweat

stream deltas at the nape of my neck when I

noticed the chemical reaction happening on

my skin, the way her river soil dampness was

blending with the travel odor on my wrists

and on my clavicle. How a city will smell

on you is not something you can predict.

I felt dizzy. She grasped both my hands

and we started walking, following the

train tracks. As she glanced around in her

distracted way, I noticed her cleavage

glistening under the street lamps. The

cathedral glowed. People here are

boisterous and suffused with self-

important warmth, intoxicating for a

girl coming from somewhere haunted,

a place that had seen her off with a

deafening hailstorm and a downpour that

had seeped into her corners. The beers and

the tinto de verano and that piña colada-like

concoction on a mostly empty stomach helped,

of course, and the sevillanas that spilled out of

wine glasses and doorways, brightly lit bars in

Barrio Santa Cruz. You don’t get this back home,

she said once, flashing me a triumphant smile.

Her laughter dove, resurfaced with the posture

of a suspension bridge, and she wore a silver

bracelet that clung to the delicate shape of her

wrist. Toward me she behaved as an indulgent

aunt would, she humored me when I wanted to

snack on roasted almonds, nap by Guadalquivir

all day, and the time I ate pork cheek and then

felt sure I had been drugged, although she did

reproach me the day I double-fisted ice cream

cones in a plaza somewhere in Alfalfa where

seven-year-olds on rollerskates were testing

out what it is to be unkind. Despite her good

breeding, she couldn’t help but judge other

women’s figures. Just imagine yourself in the

bata de cola, she’d say, as if that were the

cure for a lack of self-restraint. I found that I

could not slip away from that city of extroverts,

unnoticed. At night the big river is like a well,

and I knew that’s where all of her sadness lives,

meanwhile. Holding its breath for someone like

me. Everything about her was contagious. Yes,

even her sevillanas, which I dutifully tried to

resist, and those dark ripples in the water, which

followed me home. I’m always wondering where

the things I’ve known and lost go, but those nights

and afterward I just wondered where the things

I’ve never known and lost go, in a city like that,

where everyone called me querida, what can I

bring you, even her name rhymes with marvel, a

city unfit for girls with ghosts inhabiting their bones.

Silver Bowls

She whitewashed the air on Wednesday

as only she could. From here it felt

crisp and indigo, like the silver bowls

she used to have me polish on warm

afternoons. Outside it was that paradox

of bright and cold, we were one day away

from a full moon and some part of me

did not believe she was gone or maybe

did not believe that she could ever be gone.

That would just not be her style. Her style

was to love things fiercely, with the kind

of conviction that doesn’t just evaporate

on Tuesday nights in November. She

held on to things and people like they

might disappear at any moment, knowing

that they might. The moon was waxing

when she let go, there is never quite

enough. I could hear loss shivering

in her voice, often masking as cynicism,

but in the spaces between her words, there

was always warmth. I could feel it even

when I couldn’t hear it, and it made me

want to hold her with the intensity of

her own will to live, especially these last

few years, as though I could repay with my

touch all those afternoons she gave me a

million little jobs to keep my hands busy

and my mind in a daydream:

raking the lawn, setting the table,

weeding among the calla lilies and

camellias, washing the car, arranging

Pillsbury crescent rolls on a baking sheet

before dinner. With her,

there was always purpose,

and inside, a snack, the nightly news,

her fierce love, unspoken, except for when

she said to tell oblivious boys and professors

who assigned me too many papers to be nice.

Otherwise, I’ll have to go beat ’em up,

she would say with a sly smile.

Knife Blade

Before you get to the 101,

there’s a cut-off –

A road like a spliced limb,

frayed denim kitchen zipper

pointing south:

we went down fly,

not to Lakeport, but –

Bodies and roads alike are halved

as messily as overripe tomatoes.

Coloring outside the lines,

bleeding over the clean incision,

a cutting board long-scarred

like the Hollywood Freeway

and its delusions of symmetry.

(Even what is coarse

like an old pair of jeans ends in

spindly soft threads dangling

across freshly shaven thighs,

smooth fingernails digging

into a man's stubble, even Venice Beach

with its tattoo artists and grit

turns warm sand,

meddling between toes,

invading covert seams.)

Errata

Lover who lives

in the vellum of your skin,

in the soft tissues of your belly –

I am apologizing now

for different things than I did then.

I am forgiving you

for asking me to relieve you

of the weight of our failure.

I am uninhabiting my own bare feet

on the wood floor of that

crooked house on the hill.

I am no longer speaking to the jumble:

shadowy peacock woman,

floating red bikini,

recollection of a brassy voice
and of mischief laughing in your irises.

I am telling you now,
I should have known that there are losses
more painful than death.

August in Northern California

always means wildfires

and you and I went out in

four glorious days of burning.

I should have known because that last night

you watched me intently and wondered,
as if to the relics of smoke in the air,

who will you be when you come back?

I should have known then that people sometimes

vanish in their own survival.
That people are sometimes
unrecognizable in their own renewal,
and that I had never seen your rootedness.

I am sorry I did not understand that

imputation was to blame

when you insisted,
I am less now than I was before.

I am sorry for believing

that the afternoon we spent helping those men

push my car onto a log to unstick it from the curb 
and laughing in the wine shop afterward

was proof that the before-you was coming back,

that it was only a matter of waiting for her to re-surface.

I am not apologizing now, as I did then,

for refusing to make small-talk in the kitchen,

for the withdrawal that matched yours,

for the whole slow death of us.
In these silences that follow silences,
I am apologizing now for refusing to grieve
your and my losses
of that woman.

Headlight

Dinner at a greasy Thai restaurant

in San Luis Obispo, where the

streets seem too blissful

and escape is in a Shell station

just outside downtown

It is not a long drive down on the 101

cars sliding through darkness,

crossing the grapevine before ripening,

flitting across lanes to the 134,

the bone marrow quiet of driving alone at night

Stoplight at that empty intersection and realizing

the last time I felt my body

it was unfurling in a rest stop parking lot.

Corner coffee shop where the masochist predicted
my lust would turn to pain - 

Dampness on the stairs outside the house,

a rain I had just missed made me think I started losing limbs

a long, long time before the In N Out in Camarillo.

She ran into the living room

to embrace me, stood staring for a moment

at her feet in shock,

my fingers were still lingering in that

Highway 101 darkness and under her

tree lights I was still palpitating, scentless like last summer.

New California Writing 2013

Thanks to the bilingual online news magazine, ChicoSol.org, my poem "California Was Never Kansas" will be published this spring in New California Writing 2013, which you can check out here: https://heydaybooks.com/book/new-california-writing-2013/. ChicoSol submitted the piece for consideration to the anthology last spring, and I recently learned that it had been selected for publication. This year's contributors include Joan Didion, Robert Hass, Gustavo Arellano, Susan Straight, and David Rains Wallace; needless to say, it is a huge honor to be featured in the same collection as these folks. My work hasn't been anthologized since I was 14, when my essay "Across the River" was published in Mexico, A Love Story, so it feels good to be experiencing the vulnerability that comes with sharing one's work again.

You can read the ChicoSol version of the poem here.

Ripe Brush

Roundabout on a day like this:

16^th of November coming and coming fast,

dizzy on the streets like fingers of a fan

Every day I walked to France and back,

Los Angeles gleaming at the corner

in Le Jacaranda, scentless lilac blossoms

long since dead and pressed but not velvety

(The day of that plaza passed

in rain dripping from the eaves of

bright cafés and pooling in

drunk desert tiles dipping with

the recollection of what it’s like to be a sea)

November’s scent was black palm soap,

the oil in my hair, sweat and sunscreen,

the French perfumes that clung to me in the new city.

November’s sound was the 6 AM call to prayer,

when you woke and brushed the edges of your feet

with a stream of water running fragile in the sink

You made circles around Koutoubia at sundown,

theorized the clicking of men’s tongues,

waited for me in the garden where I found you

after the roundabout on a day like this:

fumes drifting out from behind the airbag,

six thousand miles later, I said to you,

I think I need to get out –

Temple throbbing and you still smell like soap,

yet another garden heavy with brush ripe for wildfire,

trees yearning to burn,

up here August brings the

new year, scorched acres and

this scarred body,

flattened and withering,

begging like this summer’s basil to be brought inside

Suffocating September and burning flags in Casablanca,

day eleven of the month and four fires in California.