Waltz-With-Me

In bed next to him, your arm follows the swell of your hip and your hand hugs your thigh; you've never felt so alone, or so beautiful. His closed eyes have mapped even the ghost towns of your skin; every time you slipped off your shirt you wished you could outline your contours with a dirty brush, darken your creases. Hot breath shivers on your neck as you leave him for the last time, corkboard walls still rattling in your ears, his father's shouts like accelerant aching for a match. Now your ribs pant, tired from caging your heart puckered lips kissing the same depression below his ear, lungs lolling dead in your mouth.

Look at you. Acne spilling out the edges of the sea-level sling-back dress, zipper-down, skimming the tops of your thighs. Skin slivers you forgot to cover- from the front you're glazed, concealer drying in the zits typical of your age, but not the vision you have for yourself. But from the awkward angle- through the rushing blood of boys checking you out on the street, your flushing cheeks- See how your clay nose droops? See the rough patch on the side of your neck, the cracked ceramic shoulder blade where you'll get your next tattoo. You wear that kiln-carnage dress, clinging to the malformed curves of an amateur's mi

I slip Leonard's jacket off of its brass hook by the back door, step into his large, heavy mudding boots, grip my walking stick tightly in one hand and find myself reluctant to put it down, even to wrap the jacket around my thin, shaking shoulders.  The jacket smells like mildew; I did not hang it up outside to dry properly, did not want Leonard to suspect more than he had to.  The corner of my mouth curls as I think about the silly story I told him-fell in a puddle, Leonard, it's no matter-and how readily my husband accepted it, rewrapping his worry for a later time. Darling, I feel certain I am going mad again. 

They climb in a flesh canoe for the maquiladoras to stab their pipes into and carry them down river, where the locals suck their soap refuse and haze like hash, burning out-of-season mangoes, hard-skinned and bitter.  They hack thin spit that runs along street curbs into drains beside the roundworm water and then disappears in the dry Rio Grande where even bones evaporate- caught, sand-handed, by border police. They climb in a flesh canoe with babies swaddled on their cigarette-pack shoulder pads, and dip their oars silently in the sand. Their legs ripple with the effort of remaining water. Goodnight, they tell Juarez, an

The grandmother is someone to be ashamed of.  Her wispy orange hair tufts around her ears in clumps and patches; her prosthetic leg and walker clip, scratch against the asphalt.  The father is waiting in the car, his forehead against the Arizona-hot steering wheel asking himself why, God damn it, he hadn't visited his mother earlier.   The last time he saw her his daughter was four years old, his son had just been born, and he was in the White House, shaking hands with the president.  His mother clamored on stage, beaming, lips trembling, smoothing her hair around her ears, and even though she was slow

Mia cara famiglia, If you're reading this, my body is lying embalmed in Pasquini's Funeral Home, no better than a jarred frog in formaldehyde-and my dying wishes have been totally ignored.  Don't try and deny it, Mamma, I told Pasquini's sweet son to deliver this to you only if my body showed up at his mortician father's door-I described my birthmark, so he'd know it was me.  You can imagine how glad I am now that I had the foresight to write this letter, seeing as my suspicions were completely correct and my entire family does think I'm an idiot.  Hopefully now that I'm dead, my opinion will weigh more.  Maybe on paper, just a memory, I'll

Your father’s favorite bobblehead, his fingers dancing on your scalp irritating rusted springs three taps from snapping. You cry every time he calls. Wah-wah, like Charlie Brown and old cartoons the 1930s, when men jumped out the window a mass exodus to the ground and no one noticed ‘til after ‘til cerebrospinal fluid flowed around the “haves” in oblong rushes brushing the “have nots.” You look out at the scenery a daydream distracting phone pressed to your ear and they tell you not to jump. He pressures you like a shaken cola a bursting catheter. You gust out of a punctured aeros

I am standing in the doorway.  I held her close to me here, just here, during the earthquake three years ago, when I finally decided I loved her.  I am standing here in the doorway, and she is standing by the bed, staring at an antique lampshade; I know she is remembering the day I brought it home from Brunei.  She kissed me on the mouth for the first time since our wedding.  Just in the corner, just there, but it was enough. A suitcase is on the bed, the zipper half open; she stops every few seconds to stare at a piece of our life together and remember.  The lampshade.  Ring stains on the bedside table.  The pattern the light makes on the b

she holds baby like he’s porcupine, as if his plum tomato lips stick her through, name her pincushion with their first words, ma-ma. most women coo, it’s not so bad, having your biological clock tick-stopped by grasping gasping clinging crying staying. she’s too strong to peel away softened-butter joints from her solid-food fingers, up to the knuckles in pedialyte. men see the quills on her baby-wide hips and imagine lapping at the baby-bottle poised dripping hovering millimeters from her nip-tuck lips. she prays for I want you, pulling-strings into her dark- green bustier, one pump balancing on the