Willy Palomo

How I learned to read

 

¿Are you mi Mama? 
beckoned the birdie in our favorite book.  
Cuddled and coddled, I want to brag,  
decirte that she read to me the most, 
every night. Except if you ask Mama, it was 
faith, not education, not knowledge, but the Holy 
Ghost which gave her the power to understand the scriptures, when she,
humiliated, confessed to the missionaries she didn’t know how to read. 
It never occurred to me until 
just now that if her story is true, then she never actually read me anything as a  
kid. She must have looked at 
letters & saw nothing but another endless 
maze of streets & signs, another 
nameless map of New York, left to navigate
on pure faith and instinct. She’d interpret   
pictures the same way she’d memorize streets the same way she’d read
quiet gringos, smirking as she passed. In 1st grade, I made it my goal to teach her to
read. I took out all our books in front of guests, 
spilling a library of shame into the room. I’d correct her English 
the same way I’d correct her children’s stories the same way I now write her story 
under a language she will never call home. There’s not a word for her
verdad in English, no matter how many times I try 
write it down. From a country where poets are 
executed & literacy meant little more than signing away
your name next to an X, she taught me to walk without 
zapatos, to read without an alphabet shackling my tongue. 

After Javier Zamora

 

Noche Buena

After being stripped naked by federales
for a third time on the way to Tijuana, 

after a limp peso slipped from a tear 
in Tomas's wet underwear

and he earned the electric kiss
of a taser thrice below the navel, 

its triple pronged lips 
staining his hips purple and pink,

after running for hours over freeways
dodging the lonely lights of fathers

returning home from their graves, 
my countrymen pretend

it is the cold and not the fear
--not the women disappeared 

halfway through Guadalajara, 
not the coyote's twitch at urgent questions,

not the liquored gleam on the surface
of the officials’ M-16s--that makes them 

shiver. Cornered by a dumpster
and the wicked blade of the moon,

the huddled men wait for the van
that will hide them between scrap metal

to take them over the border. 
This is not an allegory or the sermon

of a self-enamored priest. 
My primo really crossed the border 

on December 24th, 1989
after surviving more than a decade

of war. On December 25th, 
the coyote gifted him his first Whopper

in San Diego and Tia Tere
gifted the coyote another mil quinientos

for his life. The only other gift
my primo received that Christmas 

came from the man in the dumpster. 
The man leapt out of the receptacle 

with a rattling bag of aluminum cans
and scared the living shit 

out of my primo and his companions.
The men jumped back and then

laughed like idiots
with their hands in their pockets. 

Once the man realized they were migrants,
he left and returned with a box

of galletas for them to share. 
It was all they ate for the day.

Blue, Pink, and White

                                    The lake at sunset 
is the color of a trans flag. Here we are: two
          salty bitches, refusing to apologize
for our stank. Don’t mind the flies, honey. 
          They don’t harm nobody. Like you, 
our microbes have learned how to survive 
          where almost no one else can. 
We outlast salt crystals and desert 
           theocracies. Got peeps saying
we might even survive on Mars, boo! 
           You know we always been alien. 
Here, the male bison will mount one another 
           just as much as they do they gals. 
You ain’t seen eyeliner till you seen 
           our grebes, don’t know laughter 
less you been out tricking with coyotes. 
           We got cowpies better than the hair 
on some of these legislators. 
           Our eyes are the most glamourous 
mirrors and they mad they still ugly. 
          Tell Jay the real jays called and said 
ain’t no such thing as a cute billionaire. 
           You got tar on your hands, Cox. 
You got tar on your face, Jeffrey Holland.
           Me, I got a beaver, swans, avocets, 
butch-ass bison, a city full of queers 
           and natives who know my real 
name. You want hoops, I got a whole jetty. 
           You want a flag, look into the sky. 
Who you know got all these birds 
           a-flocking all the way from Canada 
to la pepita de Chile? Who you know 
           as feathered, as hooved as 
my people? Who you know die 
           this beautiful but us? 

Between mud and slush

fur gentle as smoke 

blueberry-stained gums 

thumb at your temple 

breath of pine and ice 

a hawk in an empty sky 

searching for a neck 

the jackhammer of 

woodpeckers beak-deep 

in brush and bark 

the deer look at me 

like i’m in the wrong 

neighborhood feet in 

a stream wiggling like 

amphibians i can’t 

pretend i know the 

names of the trees

the creatures who 

live in the holes 

pocking the muddy 

trail what i like most 

about this place is 

i’m not even here 

my mind holds its 

breath as i breathe 

with you the sky 

reflected in the lake’s

eye blinking back red-

yellow tears how 

grief is suspended

in the water somehow 

quiet look it’s a moose