the gloves and nosegay, each in its own red prayer, laid out, all
fighting for simple sorrows or call it what you will, part and part of

         a child-god, Let me see…

I know all the things I use to know

in custody and under sentence

of not knowing enough, if summer was more than five kinds of bees
in their waxy church accountant’s window-honeycomb, the madness
loose in happiness or quite a commotion,

pool of tears taken from some larger body of water where
I can’t swim, — then, then

I’d keep one foot up the chimney, one hand a foot beneath the interior
mole-earth, three gardeners guarding

because I’m sure I’m not Gertrude, in another country. I’m not
one old magpie, its song placed

into the body of another, hers, violently beating her with its wings
like broken-off tree limbs, full leaves swung

in genesis motion— I’m more like hunger,

its mouth close to her ear when it should be mine, here to sing motherlap
songs (There was nothing more to be said)

when, who cares really, the words,
(each to his own language),

             did not sound the same as they used to,

crushing the tallest grass in the grassfire heart, knee-deep
in their own dark singe until

            silence all around:

if it Please your Majesty!

who sits unjust as dusk in her pale gown-lace,

        swallowing down her anger

so she can be witness to this memory, this retreating display,

        no fit company for you…

you, who are part of this human, inhuman story,

no, dear, no,
the King’s kitchen is still on fire
as so many blackbirds darken the closed windows,

                the only way they know out.

I went to bed but did not blow out the candle
        because I knew he was there, in the dark hold
without any counterpart
but me. So I opened one eye, considering my years and sorrows, to see

what I could, anything realized, bound around with rope to avoid falling,
as in flying from, as if the entire room was beds of feathers
and each breath fell,

thrushes and blackbirds; and then pirates —
downed windless, and
sometimes a snipe ended black with ants in the bottom of a gully

and I ended white
        with nothing left to say, but

seized the branch above him, climbed it, moved into the leafiest part

parting my legs as if
to see me was to see her, the one he really loved, as if
seeing was knowing and then

he knew her and so himself

who thought she had been swallowed up by the earth

but no, it hurts the eye to look out so long to vantage a point on the room’s horizon,
to language a hover of starry seeds
that he left, really,
to be planted in every night’s sleep, crop-dusted, weeded and dragged
with a last senseless clutter of words
        not for him or for me, but for something far
more pronounced lasting: that

the galloping horse carried off the surname,

her name, her name…

Bedlam fair, a far cry from–

An alarm of silence behind it. How the future retreating into a painting
is part. Against your will.

        Eyes closed.
        Eyes opened under water.

Though it is something you see, you feel it inside
your mouth, earth-flavored,
and your lungs’ motion exactly like waves, filled with water light.

He who hath drunk the mixture called “Doctor”,
milk, nutmeg, water & rum, to cure the King’s Evil…

He who couldn’t care crushed bugs in the meadow…

        Where Aspen trees offer winter’s first coin.
        Where the maps printed lily-outlay, saw the high ground in blood.
        Where the unmoved moon covet in full-face snow, like sleeptalk.
        Where you can locate a glass bead, the size of his thumb, drawn

butterflies, inside the larynx, the voice-box singing and singing for you,
in mourn & celebration, awe’s act of only air, less alone by the minute.

Such ascent between music & mathematics
        at the sky’s all-ache helm blue…

Therefore, godly hour.
Therefore, overgrown & undone.
Everything, if by love, is imperfect.

        Shining indecipherable, we are at that moment.

        To unfurl and flower, as if

saying farewell.

1
Silent hands
that build
a garden
one stone
placed next
to another
then one more
until the eye
is no different
from stone

2
Smooth hands
with the milky dew
of brand new skin
just big enough
to hold a giant sun-
weathered finger
so small
they startle open
in nascent
dream

3
Empty hands
to measure
seasons
by spoons
and needles
brushes
and pens
hands that don’t
wait to be
filled

Drivers in traffic lonelying along in the radio-narrated dark
and craving you, with your know-nothing
New breath–

Come closer.

We are denizens of a privileged geography–
and we are starving. You are the youngest year,
the only lucky thing left in the cupboard.

It’s almost time. The clock ticks us closer together.
Swoon our steps toward spring. Shine the blooms until
words flower in our mouths. Help us remember that
there is still the whole sky to swallow. Tell
the full moon to sing the wolves in our throats.

grills giving up blue smoke to the blue mountains
blocks away from an avenue of orange-gemmed trees

from the Colonial Garden, the Willow Glen, the Capri,
apartments where migrants waited Monday mornings

for pickups to take them to a field where the last
orchard of Orchard Road was newly bulldozed

waiting in straw cowboy hats at the park tables on Sundays
where blue ice shadows fell from eucalyptus

nearby, usually, a girl with hand on hip
tight tee shirt shot with glitter, a tiny gold cross

at her throat, arms filled with a pastel spume
of infant blankets as up and up the hills new houses

climbed with bony whiteness, skinny palms
leaning hard as night drew on and with it

small birds singing with joy,
I would say, then at daylight

a house painter padding on the roof, music thinning
from a paint spattered radio

reflections like fireflies ricocheting off smooth water that was both
brown and green

like a mirror in a dark room that the headlights of turning cars
ply with light

the shivering of my yellow skirt in warm, still air

whatever it was I was waiting for. How palm fronds and banana leaves

shone slickly like swords. She was remembering when not yet twenty
she lost her job and her tears and her brother saying go dress up

taking her to a hotel roof garden where a dance band played
and there was a little breeze

a paste of talcum between her breasts and thighs, an ice cube
she ran across her throat, across the back of her neck.

the child’s deliberate crayon stroking, hard pressed
opaque blue, shinging.

Bright hot chrome of rickrack waves serially repeating

scrape of metal on cement, a table moved to the shade.

Squinting, you think you see a pattern. The sun,
that godlet

finally lays down its metal shield. I don’t know
what to say about the child.

like a low horizon filled
with mounding clouds

their suggestion of
somewhere else

capability of stirring longing
while teaching distance

so much is vapor
a high wind can shift

movement darkly insubstantial
above flat land where scrub
mesquite claws

the thing waited for
skin prickling under a cloud’s

cool and imperceptible
journeying, rain’s
concluding arrows

I saw you
your red heels slicing night
on the Ave. next to Johnny’s pastrami stand

I saw you
struttin’ over slick pavement
your white dress faded
threads running down its side

and you soared under the street lights
rising above Crenshaw
them beams got you on spotlight Muh
your arms held high and open
as if you were waiting for some knight to swoop you up

help you flow to a time
where you sat innocent in front of a television chewing on buttered popcorn
all the while giggling
your tight ponytail at rest between your shoulder blades

but this image fades
my dream cuts back to night
where you are sprawled out on some dirty motel bed
a drug dealer’s prize

Muh
I saw you walking the Ave.
tell me I’m dreaming

wake me
won’t you
wake me

letting her nakedness
intoxicate the sick

her slender arched feet
give me the blues

inside this strip club
along sunset boulevard

where Van Gogh’s ghost
is hunched over my trembling back

and we lonely married men
yearn for young ripe flesh

while tupac’s california dreamin’
booms above our heads

and the image of Van Gogh’s print hanging on my daughter’s wall
blinks in front of my eyes

as the girl dances like the wild cypresses
swaying above the yellow wheat fields

swirls of blue and white colliding
on the end of Van Gogh’s brush

before she climbs the gold pole
i smell the meat of her white thighs as they go snug, like a vice, around the coolness of the pole

i reach in my pocket for mo-green
to keep feeding her crisp dollars because she is the free cypress

she is the knife grazing my neck
she is the what if . . .

Most significant for me is that Hour of Unfolding is my first book. Something I’ve dreamed about for a long time, as many do. Less significant for the world, perhaps, but I’m happy to join the great sea of poetry.

What was your process in finding a publisher? How long did it take? Did you primarily send your manuscript to first-book contests?

Once I decided the ms. was ready to submit, I studied various book contests. My breakdown was about 85% first-book contests, 15% free-for-all. I was quite methodical. Each week I set aside time to check out publishers’ catalogs and philosophies on their websites. I made sure several contest entries were out at a time so each rejection didn’t sting as much.

In all, the process of sending out the ms. before Briery Creek Press selected it as the winner of 2010 Liam Rector First Book Prize for Poetry took one year.

How did your manuscript change during this process (if it did, in fact, change)? Did you rework the focus, change the title, reorder poems?

The ms. went through much evolution before I started submitting it, at least three restructurings. Also some pruning and revision. The title changed during this pre-submission period, when I discovered my first title was shared by a literary journal. Once I started sending it out, I took the advice David St. John gives to all–to allow that one ms. to be tested over time without changes.

Partway through the year, I added a couple of poems because I was near the minimum page count desired in most contests. Basically, the ms. I began sending out was the one chosen.

For some of your poems, you work in a narrative mode. In these heavily lyric times, what draws you to the narrative?

I enjoy the lyric narrative; there’s a sense of story, albeit a fractured one. It’s not A happens then B then C. The poems are meditations with moments of deepening, going into the lyric, supported by a loose narrative framework. With exceptions, of course. Always exceptions.

Are your poems based on real-world events?

Some are, but only as a point of departure. All reality is up for grabs. I’m more interested in emotional truth than factual.

than when they came in. Faces warmed by amber
liquid, slivers of red and green neon trickle
through an opening door, as a trout leaps
from roof sign to bar stained with last calls.

In the long mirror, reflections of smudged mascara,
crooked smiles trying too hard. A man in cowboy shirt
crisp from the box sits next to the mechanic
with grease tattoos, together they watch the women

with big hair, teased and sprayed to a volume
that rivals the music, circle the dance floor in search
of a final round. The band plays Buck and Waylon,
all regret and redemption, a sentiment almost

worth the going home. Down Chester Avenue,
the night shift settles in at the Chevron Refinery,
truckers pull off Highway 99, turning into
the Friendly Cafe for one more cup.

Trout’s door swings wide and you’re invited,
welcomed inside for that last hour
of unfolding when love or pure luck – call it
what you will – can strike the weakest line.

It was harder to cut parallel to the vein
than I’d expected. Instead, I scratched out
shallow, perpendicular cuts I knew
were ineffective. It was harder than I thought

to take enough pills, or the right kind,
calibrated excess, though my brother had managed to,
dying off-stage like that, while I was safe at school.
In the furnace of that first July weekend,

our mother refused to let anyone else attend
the funeral and the gravediggers refused
to lower him into the ground until
the fireworks were over.

Harder to die even when I wanted to, harder
than being the one awake at sunrise. The razor, the pills,
the wishing I could change places – none of it worked.
How had the others managed it? The ones who

taped up the kitchen windows and wouldn’t budge
even when the delivery boy rang the doorbell.
Or kept the car locked as it filled with fog
and the radio played Mood Indigo. For them,

was it harder to turn back from the bridge railing
or to jump into darkness? I just kept on inhaling,
exhaling, could only hold my breath so long
until I gave in to the habit all over again.

“Yeah, I seen that before. You know these batteries is all ancient, like fifteen twenty some years, right?” Billy cracks his neck then continues swapping from his station.  Like most swappers, he’s still too small to see completely over the console and relies on an array of mirrors to manipulate the truck.  He rotates his reach halfway to the north wall, then lowers the forks down to the stockpile of locomotive fuel cells, slides them in, lifts, and pulls back again.  He spins the reach around again precisely, lifts the forks high, and slides the cell into the train.  “There’s a pallet jack in the hothouse,” he calls over to Vero, “call Jimmy bring it by ‘fore your meter goes off.  Let him know you’re out. Why don’t you snap them electrodes up top while you wait?”

Vero makes a call on the radio to Jimmy, the Alto Section Foreman.  She puts in a request for a replacement truck battery, but he’s busy helping another kid.  Vero is forced to walk there herself for the pallet jack, so she lets Billy know what’s happened and abandons her truck.  This is fine; she’d rather stroll over to the hothouse than climb up the train any day.

The corridor leading up is flanked on either side by inoperable windows that stand between the turbine fields of the Chamuscado Mountains to the south, and those of the Agridulces to the north.  The railway cuts through both ranges, the flatlands that lead away to the city, and continues on to the desert’s eastern interior.  All tracks converge at this station.  The hothouse itself is the central electric fuel cell recharging plant for this, the primary station of Acton Trains.

Jimmy’s the mastermind who rearranged it to house the larger Alto Train cells along the bottom stretch of outlets, with the smaller Baja Train cells stacked tight to line the upper compartments.  Before Jimmy’s plan came along, the kids stuck them anywhere they’d fit, and often that resulted in a backload of depleted cells that were too heavy to be supported by the upper divides.  Now everyone recognizes his new way as an obvious, simple arrangement that anyone could’ve come up with, but it was all Jimmy.  It earned him his big promotion.  Today his face is sullen.  When Vero arrives, he’s only just finished helping one of the older girls load a batch of cell replenishments.  The girl starts the cart and as she pulls off on delivery, he begins to scrub the tread from the concrete.

“Jims, I’m down.  Need a pallet jack and recovery pronto.”  Vero walks directly toward the only available jack, and removes a clipboard from the wall.  As she signs the unit out to herself, she glances back over at the foreman.  “Mark me off twenty minutes, wouldja? Hey.  Hey, cabron, you awake? You even hear me dude?”

Jimmy continues to scrub the floor.  He doesn’t look up at her, but through his teeth tells her quietly and with only a slight movement of his lips, “You and Billy meet me off the tracks after shift, canya?  Don’t say nothin’.  Bring me some oil if you got it. I’ll pay. I’m good for it.”  He scrubs and scrubs.

Something like panic fertilizes Vero’s body.  She feels it energize her limbs and push against her fingers.  She opens them wide then makes a fist, then spreads them out like brittle sticks and leaves them like that for a moment.  Jimmy’s the saint of his crew, and rarely misses a chance to extol the meaty benefits of living oil-free.  She uses the pallet jack to retrieve a fresh cell in silence.  When she’s loaded and ready to return to her station, Vero offers, “See you round.” She drives off, alit with concern.

After removing the old battery and as the new one mounts itself, she waves Billy down from his task.  He lowers his truck.  When he’s within speaking range she tells him, “Jims asked me for oil.  He didn’t look so good.  I don’t know what to think.  You seen him today?”

Billy looks surprised, shakes his head and replies, “I ain’t seen him since Monday.”  He squints, “Last time I seen Jimmy shoot, his ama had her head off by the cutters.  No.  He either sneakeen’ real good or ‘bout to blow some ugly out. God I hope it’s the shootin. That culo’s lotsa things, but he ain’t oily.  He just ain’t.”

Vero’s hand opens and closes again.  “He wants to meet us both after work.  Call in the crew, huh?”

“Yeah, yeah, alright.  God I hope he’s just shootin. Aw, shit.” Billy pulls up on his reach and slides the last of the cells from his work order into the Alto Train.  When he finishes, he lowers his truck again and shuts it down, then punches a code into his monitor.  “I’ll come help you clamp them electers after you finish swapping.  Gonna just break.  I’ll call ‘em ri’now.  Gimme a sec. I know that fool ain’t oily. I know that fool.  Aw hell, I bet he gonna blow out.”

Billy leaves his truck and enters the nearest break room.  It’s lined with long, cheap tables and framed prints of overaged youths.  Billy picks up a courtesy phone, the gaze of his blue eyes coming to rest blankly on a framed youth’s lapel.  He dials Cole, Watch Boss over the Fixers, a team that has the toughest job around, but for the best pay.  They clean and repair the railroad tracks, and though it’s hot and rough, sometimes the tracks provide their own reward.  Cole makes enough money to keep his own room at The Stump.  He lives there with his two brothers.

Today, the tracks have born fruit; not one but two birds were found dismembered near to them.  Incredibly, each bird still possessed its oil sac, and Cole has spent the better part of the morning extracting the oil.  All he needs, he tells Billy, is something to cook it in, and some starch with which to cut it.  Billy promises the tools, and Cole agrees to get the rest of the crew together off the tracks, at the graveyard, after shift.

As soon as the closing bell rings, Vero and Billy head together to the locker room.  Like many street kids, they slip from matching work uniforms to matching crew colors.  Theirs are bristling blue sashes crisscrossed upon bare chests.  The ends of the sashes drift down almost to the backs of their knees.  Beneath the cloth, they are a mass of skinny bodies in jeans.  They wear knives tied to their legs, and huaraches to their feet. Like every day, today Billy has to tie Vero’s sash for her.

“I wonder what’s happened,” she muses and stands straight, facing her open locker.  “Is Cole bringing the oil?”

“Yeah. He got lots.”

“Good, ‘cause I’m out and need to get my brain offa Jims.  Starting to sweat.  Feel pretty bad.” She inhales deeply, then holds her breath briefly before blowing it out.

“Lean forward.  Good thing y’ain’t got no tits yet.  Goddamnit, lean forward.” He tugs on the sash, pulling it taut.  He’s fixed it for her dozens of times, but today his hands are clumsy.  He cracks his neck then tugs again, repositions the sash, and tucks it beneath the inside wrappings, letting the ends hang down.

“I could have.”  She fastens her knives to both sides of each leg with thin twine that loops through twin sheaths.  She’s decorated the twine with quail beaks. “I could,” she repeats.

“Come on,” he says as he buttons up his jeans and flips his own sash around his slender, pale body without effort.  “I gotta know what he done.”

Normally, Billy would be overjoyed about the dead birds and free oil.  The idea that he would soon inject a larger than average amount of purer than average stuff into his arm would normally be enough to send him dashing down the tracks with Vero, belting out throaty anticipation chants.  Oil has taken on almost superhuman characteristics for many street kids, Billy included.  He’s not addicted to it yet, unlike her, but he’d rob for it anyway.  Vero doses on each break at work, all day, every day.  It’s why she’s smaller than normal.  This evening, Billy’s thoughts orbit around one central fact: Jimmy wants the oil.  This frightens him.  It affects his mood so distinctly that he doesn’t speak a word to Vero along the way to the graveyard, and doesn’t even notice that she’s trailed behind, also lost in thought.  Eventually, the two youths reach the path that leads off the tracks and on to the railcar graveyard.

Vero calls up, “Billy, what do you think’s happened?”

He shrugs without turning around.  He stops a moment to grab a fistful of rocks, and throws them at one of the dead cars that they’ve approached.  The rocks clatter down the side of it, and somebody hollers from inside.  “Dunno.  Maybe they cut up his other mother,” he laughs.  “Maybe he been shootin’ all this time and jus kep it low.  Dunno.”  Soon they approach their car—it is theirs, Vero and the Fixers tagged it a month ago—and push the door open.

The rest of the crew is already inside, even Jims.  Their railcar is from the old days.  It’s even made of steel, or at least the frame is.  The door’s newer, a castoff from work, where Vero’s much lower in rank than either Jimmy or Cole.  Here, though, she leads them.  This is her crew. Born and bred, hers.

“Evening, Rats.” says Vero as she climbs up into the car.  The small crowd returns a mumbled chorus of hellos to her.  “Jims, do you mind all this?” She steadies herself and indicates the others with her free hand.

“No.” He looks down and is abashed.  “Thank you.”

Vero nods.  She helps Billy climb into the car, and he slams the cobalt door shut, keeping only the top vents open. Someone’s already lit a pinyon fire and though the sun hasn’t set yet, the youthful faces inside of the car glow from the warm light of the fire and sun.  A small pijuro climbs on his brother’s shoulder to open a slider window, letting in still more light and air.  The car smells of sweat and smoke.  Most of the seventeen Desert Rat members are railway or turbine employees, but a few are still just streetkids that steal or trick for food.  The pijuros of the crew are easy to spot: the boys wear azure lipstick and false, turquoise-colored lashes.  The girls shave their heads and paint their faces and stomachs with blue clay.  Every Actonian loves androgyny. Every Rat wears blue.

“Are you using or are you gonna blowout?” Vero stands before Jimmy.  Her stance is wide, her arms crossed against her sash-tied chest. Her thin body casts an imposing shadow over the boy.

“I’m a blowout.  And tonight I’m using.  I’m a blowout.  Oh, we’re fucked.  We’re so fucked,” he moans.  Jims’ tawny head droops between his knees.  “I’m sorry, fellas, I am.“  His face contorts and he suddenly appears younger than the fourteen years he owns.

Vero turns to the boy Cole and insists, “Where’s the oil? Give him a needle already.”

Cole is slung low over a molcajete, into which he squishes a few juniper berries to mix with the oil.  He glances up and responds, “Billy said he’d bring the cookin’.  I need starch if we gonna shoot.  Gotta cook it, you know.” He turns to Billy.  “You got it? You got my potato, culo?”

Billy’s forgotten to bring the tools, he was so afraid of what this meeting would entail.  He offers to run to town to buy them, but Vero interjects.

“I’ll go.  Billy, next time remember your promises.”

“I will,” says Billy. Oh god, he thinks, now we’re all cold for crows, “I was locked, you know, on Jimmy.”

“Well, I’ll get the fucking potato and some heat.  Jims, don’t you say a word till I get back.  Billy,” she turns again to her coworker, “prep the needle while I’m gone.”

Vero slides the car door open again, exposing the seventeen small Rat-faces to the twilit landscape for a moment, then slams it.  She walks out past the graveyard and follows the path, then the tracks, directly into town.

Central Acton is a mass of street hawkers.  It’s full of the wealthy and the soon-to-be, or at least the wannabes.  Vero’s been a regular customer here since she was a small girl, and knows where to get the best produce.  Today she doesn’t want the best.  She wants the cheapest.  For this, she runs to Yucca Boulevard, where the service people shop.  This is where her own mother shopped before her head was off by the police.  She has this tragedy in common with Jims.  Both heads off, both arms pierced.  On Yucca Boulevard, Kyle’s Kornucopia sells the cheapest and rankest produce.  Vero intends to buy a potato full of eyes, but realizes that she’s left her card at work again. She can’t buy anything without it.

She looks around for anyone she might know to spot her some change, but sees only the grocer, who’s arguing with somebody over the price of wilted alfalfa sprouts.  Vero absentmindedly strokes the beaks that adorn her knives.  One potato is enough to cut tonight’s shoot and the next, and the next.  One potato is twenty cents.  She has a lot more than twenty cents on her card.  Twenty cents is nothing.  One potato is nothing.  She takes the potato with the most eyes and stuffs it in her pants.  She’s moving it into position when the grocer glances over from his conversation and spots her with her hand down her pants.

Vero’s hand, along with the lump in her pants, is completely conspicuous. The grocer rushes over from the sprouts to grasp the girl by the shoulders, “That’s it!” he yells into the Friday evening crowd, “that’s it! I’m not taking any more losses from you gutter shits! Police!” he cried out, “Police! I have a goddamned thief! I have a thief,“ he cries. Vero has never been caught stealing.  This is her crew’s job.  She’s never had a direct hand in this, at least not since bringing the kids together.  The girl shrugs.  She pulls the potato from her pants.  As she lowers it back to the produce shelf, the potato is intercepted by a third hand.

“My boy is ornery, isn’t he? Tell me,” asks the man connected to the hand, “how much for this potato and a pound of yellow squash?”

“This little fucker’s going to prison, old man. I don’t care who he is.” The grocer hasn’t released his grip on Vero’s shoulders.  She stands between the two of them, calm but interested in what’s happening.

“This boy belongs to me, and I believe you won’t feel a loss today.”  He pulls a card from his waistband and offers, “I’ll give you fifty dollars for the squash and that potato.  Do you still want the potato, boy?”

“Yes sir,” replies the girl, “I need it.”  She wouldn’t call the man kindly, exactly.  But his pale, nearly translucent silk suit proves his wealth.  That wealth is enough to compel Vero to behave for a moment.

The grocer licks his lips, and loosens his grip on Vero. “Give it, then.  Come on pal,” he says to the man.

The man punches something in on his card then hands it to the grocer.  His skin is smooth and dark in some places, light in others.  Vero considers the man’s lean frame, the outline of which she can easily trace through his suit.  He has poor posture, she observes, and leather shoes.  When the transaction concludes, the man thanks the grocer, taking the bag of produce in one hand, and Vero’s hand in the other.  He begins to walk eastward.

“Where are you taking me?”

“I thought we’d have dinner together, child.  What do you call yourself?”

“Vero.”

“Well, Veto, we’re going to have a fine time, you and I.  We’re going to have a fiesta.” His damp grip on her hand tightens somewhat.  She decides not to correct him, but is suspicious.

“Thanks. I’m awfully poor, sir.  That potato was gonna be my only meal in two days.  Two days, sir.” She blinks as she looks up at him.

“Yes, you are slight, aren’t you? Quite helpless.”

“Would you help me out? Would you spare a bit? Just a few bucks maybe?”

“I’d be happy to fill your belly, Veto.  You must help me with something in the meantime. Do not ask me for money again.”

Vero believes that she’s met men like this before, and decides to disappear. “Thanks for helping me out sir, but I’ve really got to get going.  I was just on my way—“

“I think your plans can wait awhile, don’t you? After all, if it weren’t for me, you’d be in handcuffs and unable to go anyplace, isn’t that right?” The man looks down at her and smiles.  “I’d hate to have to make a phone call.”

“Yessir.”

“Good boy,” the old man smiles down at Vero, “that’s a good boy.” The two turn onto Prim Avenue, one of the wealthiest residential streets in Acton.

The man, known as Hicks Jaybourne by his peers, lives on a middling lot lined with cherrywood trees.  He may live on Prim, but the driveway leading to his house is only large enough to fit an electric bike.  Vero scuffs her feet on the darkened dirt pathway and thinks, he ain’t rich enough to have a goddamned car. She eyes him again as they walk.  This prick’s a fraud, she thinks. I gotta get the hell out of here. I gotta go shoot, I gotta go shoot.

“How long have you lived on Prim, sir?”

He answers her quickly, without returning her gaze, “All my life.  My father built this house.”

This keeps her quiet, and he pulls her along the grounds toward the house.  Along the way, she eyes his gardens.  He may not have a car, but he’s got a vast network of imported flora that requires imported water, as well.  His hands are sweaty.  Vero slides free from the grasp and runs in the opposite direction as quickly as she can.  Her huaraches slap against the dirt.  She begins to turn once again onto Prim Avenue when a searing pain shoots through her calf.  She drops to the ground, clutching at her leg.

Sr. Jaybourne stands over her with a longshot taser held tightly in his fist. “And now you ask me to carry you inside, boy.  What a shame.”  He draws Vero up into his wet arms; she is too surprised to fight him.

“You shot me.”

“If one behaves as a jackrabbit, one will be treated as one.  Do not try to leave again. You may leave when I am ready.  Understand?”

She doesn’t answer.  She looks at the approaching house and tries not to feel his body against hers.  She begins to plot her escape and all the time she knows that she must shoot within a couple of hours.  Sr. Jaybourne calls out for someone named Ario.  This turns out to be a thin, gopher-faced woman.

“Ario, this child has fallen and may have hurt himself.  Please clean him up and set him with dinner at the table, thank you.”  He looks down into Vero’s face and asks, “Can you walk with Ario’s help?”

“Let’s find out.” she glares at him.

Jaybourne lowers Vero to the ground and the Ario woman helps to steady her.  The man says, “…and Ario, this is a street child.  He is a liar and a thief.  I have been witness to both behaviors in the short time that I’ve known him.  Rather than allow him to go to prison, I believe that he might be improved by some good, honest work. Watch your pockets.  Close your ears.  I will change for dinner. Quickly, please.” He then turns and walks inside the house, without another word or glance.  Vero shakes her head.

“He just shot me with a taser.”

“Sure enough.  Name is?”

“Vero. Jesus, is he crazy?”

“You oughtta be thankful. Shut that mouth, Veto.”

“Vero.  Not Veto.”

“Vero ain’t no boy’s name.  Venga, now.” The woman helps her limp into a bathroom, and draws a bath for her.  “Mister Jaybourne eats clean. You show him respect and wash.”  Vero sits on a wicker chair as the woman collects items for the bath.  “He’s a good man,” continues Ario.  She lifts herself onto her toes and reaches into a deep cabinet.  She retrieves a dark green pair of drawstring work pants, and a matching t-shirt.  “These might fit.” She stands before Vero, evaluating the girl.  She nods, as if she’s decided something. “Now peel off and go have a bath, be sure to soak that leg.  Call out when you’re clean, and I know clean.”

“Just let me go, lady. This is kidnapping. This is crazy.  You people are crazy!”

“What’s crazy is your mouth.  You ungrateful boy.  You just call out when you’ve finished.” The woman leaves the room and closes the door.  By the time she’s finished bathing and dressed in the wrong colored boys’ clothes, Vero’s leg is fine, but her body has begun to tremble.  Her withdrawal will only get worse from here.

She is frightened of the man’s taser, and the stuffed quail and cactus pear look delicious, so she resigns herself to eat with the old man at his long table.  He makes her uncomfortable, talking about her boyish arms and big appetite.  She is afraid to tell him that she’s not a boy.  She’s frightened of lots of things, but even her fear lessens with the weight of her desire for oil.

When they finish eating, he coaxes her out to his backyard, placing his patchwork hands upon her shoulders to walk behind as if to direct her.  She feels exposed and unhappy. She feels his breath bearing down upon her.

“Why are you making me stay here? What are you doing? I need to go.”

“You will pay your debt and then you may leave.  And if you like, I will tutor you another day.”

“Horse shit, you’ll never see me again.”

“So you say.” He pats her on her lower back.  “Right over there, Veto.” The man points at a pinyon stump with an axe buried within it.  There are several sections of cut trees beside it. “I need you to chop that wood.”

“It’s night time!” She protests. “I can’t chop wood at night!”

“You can, and you will.  It’s hardly dusk, and there will be plenty of starlight.  Now go.”

The old man settles himself into an oversized rocking chair.  He sways back and forth, watching the dimly lit Vero walk glumly to the stump.  She hasn’t quite figured out how to get out of this mess.  He’s got the taser in his breast pocket; she saw its outline.  The backyard is fenced in with adobe and too high to scale.  She can cut through it with the axe or try to cut off his leg, but knows she would be caught.  But they think I’m a boy, she thinks, I could probably get away with anything.

She picks up a section of wood and rests it on the stump.  Next she grips the axe; it’s heavy.  She isn’t very sure if she can use it to chop wood, much less to kill him.  She swings it high over her head and brings it down as hard as she can, missing the section completely.  The axe head is buried deep in the tree stump.  She jostles it until it comes free, and tries again.  This time she succeeds, and the wood splits clean through. Vero turns behind her in triumph, and Mr. Jaybourne grins at her from the lit porch, raising a fist in her direction.

This will, Vero decides, keep her mind from the oil.  The oil, the oil, the oil.  The sooner she finishes, the sooner she can shoot.  She brings the axe up and throws it down.  The wood splinters.  She pulls up, and heaves down.  She brings another wood section to the stump and begins to chop that one.  Her arms weaken after only two sections.  If she was a boy she’d probably barely have broken a sweat—but she continues anyway; the quicker done, the quicker to shoot. She chops as hard as she can, and when her arms are so weak that she cannot lift the axe anymore, she’s only finished four sections.

Vero tosses the axe down near her feet and leans over the stump to catch her breath.  She hears the man approaching and turns around to complain, but he grips her from behind and pushes her face-first against the stump, hard. Her breath comes out.

The man leans in with his mouth against her ear and whispers, “There are no free tickets in life, Veto.” She tries to free herself, but fails.  Hicks Jaybourne brings his hand around to the front of Vero’s body and clutches at the air between her legs, then quickly jerks back and shoves her away from him.  She falls to the ground.

“Where is it?” the man demands, “What’s happened to you?”

“Where is what, you sick fuck?” Vero is terrified and confused. Her hand clenches tight and then opens wide and free.  Then it clenches again.

“Your cock boy, where’s your cock?” He knocks a fist against his leg, his face disfigured.

“I don’t have one.” She smooths her pants with her hand. “I don’t have one,” she repeats.

“That’s impossible!”

Vero laughs and draws herself up.  “Look pal, I just ain’t got no tits yet from the oil.  Let me scoot on out of here and dose and I won’t tell no one what you done. I don’t have what you want so just let me go.”

“You’re a drug addict? You’re just a child!”

“But old enough to fuck, huh sir? That right sir? Piss it.”

Hicks opens his mouth to speak, but closes it again, turns, and walks quickly back to the house.  Vero remains where she stands.  The sky has deepened and become pockmarked with stars.  She looks up at them, grows dizzy, and straightens her clothes again.  Her fists clench.  Sr. Jaybourne opens the back door, enters the house, and closes the door again behind him.  Vero turns to survey the adobe fence.  She turns back to observe the house.  She looks up one final time, and sucks in her breath before she begins to move her body toward the house again.

She grips the door handle and she turns it, opens the door, and holds the jam for support as she steps inside.  The old man isn’t immediately visible, but Vero hears a conversation coming from the next room.  It is an audible knot, thick with moans and hisses. Then the house goes silent but for footsteps approaching her.

Ario appears and crosses the room to touch Vero’s face.  “I got a daughter myself.  She got took from me and put in the Cué.  I ain’t seen her in three years.”

Vero meets the woman’s gaze and tells her flatly, “I don’t care.”

The woman nods and says, “Mister Jaybourne says you got a will that’s good for general labor.  He’ll pay, a wage and a roof. You really a shooter?” She reaches to take Vero’s arm and check, but the girl snatches it away again.

“Lady, I got a crew to take care of. And I already got a job.  Unless you got a way to fix my boys and me up real good, I don’t see why any of my business is yours.” Vero is neither defiant nor desperate.  She is only lightheaded.  She is composed and in charge.

“Yes,” Ario replies, sticking her fat tooth out from behind her lips, “Yes, well. Mister Jaybourne says you stay the night without them drugs.  You’ll get three hundred dollars.  That’s a week, every week.  You make that at the turbines?”

“I don’t work at the turbines.”

“It’s the railway then? You didn’t hear the wire tonight, didja?”

“I guess I was too busy getting attacked by your patrón to watch the wire.  Do ya think I’ve missed the novellas, too?”

Ario either doesn’t hear or understand what Vero’s told her.  She doesn’t even blink, but instead informs the girl that, “Acton Railways is complying.”

Vero vision whirls.  Complying.  That means she’s out of work.  Everyone’s out of work.  Legally, children under the age of fifteen can’t work anywhere, but it’s an ancient law that isn’t a bit practical, and hasn’t been enforced for centuries.  The new mayor’s incited some new wave of activism among the people with houses, but Vero had no idea their protests would actually influence anybody.  If Acton Railway goes legal, it means the turbines will too, and no doubt the trashmen will follow.  If Acton Railway goes legal, all the children will become pijuros or thieves.  No more kids. Oh Santos this is Jimmy’s blowout.  Oh Madre what about the Rats. She says nothing, but a rush of heat fills her face and she feels sick for the future and the oil. Her stomach roils.

Ario continues without much pause, “Well, sleep on it.  I’ll take you to your room. We have pastillas to help you in the night.”

“I bet you do,” says Vero. “Now go,” she commands before turning to vomit on a mandala-woven rug.

The girl cannot keep the pills down.  She finds that if she sits upright in the bed they’ve made for her, and neither turns her head nor moves her eyes, she is fine.  But if any part of her body moves, she vomits again.  If she tries to sip water, she vomits.  If she breathes too deeply she vomits.  Hicks doesn’t appear during the night, but sends a doctor to inspect her with beeping meters and activated cloths.

“She will not die,” he concludes from another room, but Vero disagrees.  His muffled voice sounds stupid to her.  “She has no fever, she isn’t convulsing.  Her symptoms are mild.  This is no worse than the hangover we shared in Valencia, eh old man?” She hears laughter.  Within fourteen hours, Vero throws up thirty-two times, and at the end of it she sleeps and is weakened.  She is thirsty.  She first peers into, and then empties the plastic cup they’ve left for her.  Her grounded room smells of vinegar and oranges, not vomit nor sweat.  Ario cleaned even while the girl was sick, and the possibility that this contributed to her nausea doesn’t escape Vero’s notice.

Hicks appears in her bedroom the next morning supporting a tray with coffee and a bowl of menudo.  He asks her to sit up.  She complies, and the man straddles the tray against her stretched-out legs.

“I hope you’ll stay,” he tells the girl.  “I hope as well that you’ll forgive an old man his savagery.” He touches his forefinger to his chin, nods, and reaches into his jacket pocket.  He retrieves three hundred dollar bills and lays them on the tray beside the food.  “You’ve spent one night but expended a week’s energy.  Your first week’s wage, then.” He waits for her to meet his gaze before continuing, “Should you decide to stay, you’ll receive another three hundred by next Wednesday.  You’ll help Ario around the house, and keep the lawn.  You’re to stay here and off the streets, and if I see any narcotics, even a hint of them, you may return to your hovel without pay.  We’ll not speak of the incident again.  Clean yourself by lunch,” he adds, then turns around and strolls out the door, latching it behind him, humming an ugly tune.

Vero leans in to hover over the steaming food. Her eyes are closed.  The soup’s steam slickens her face.  She thinks of Billy and the other kids.  She imagines a crashing of glass, and a woman’s scream.  Many angry children shout a cacophonic Vero, Vero, Vero. The Desert Rats hurl rocks through Hicks Jaybourne’s windows, front and back.  The Rats have billy clubs and jackknives, all with her own quail beaks.  Billy lags behind the others to lift Vero through the bedroom window and out to safety.  The others rush the dining room where Hicks eats his poached egg with soft cheese and fall upon the man.  The Rats beat the old man senseless with their weapons, and finally to death. One of the youngest boys in the crew, a pijuro, giggles and smears the blood from his club across his cheekbone with a pinky finger. Mr. Jaybourne’s face no longer makes sense.

“We got nothin’ to lose!” Jims is animated, full of oil and bloodlust. He drives his knife across the dead man’s guts to pull out his intestines. “We all fucked now,” he repeats.

“All I want is some goddamned oil,” Vero sighs, lifts her dampened face up, and leans back to sip the black coffee.  She will stay in this house and work for the man’s money, and she will send every penny home to her boys.  The window beside her bed opens to the gardens of Hicks Jaybourne, where birds of paradise grow up from below the windowsill, their bright orange flowers indifferently gazing into the room where she lies.

        in a forest, a museum. Everyone wants
to cause a scene at a funeral, to yell at
        everyone, no exceptions; even people
who can fight back. Everyone wants their mother

        to cause a scene at a funeral, to yell at.
The heart wants to rip out the heart.
        Who can fight back? Everyone wants their mother;
everyone wants a bed with a lid.

        The heart wants to rip out the heart:
blood and noise and quiet and dust.
        Everyone wants a bed with a lid
and time and television and lovers and

        blood and noise and quiet and dust.
Wanting gets the heart to beat itself
        and time and television and lovers and…
The list of what we want burns as we write it.

        Wanting gets the heart to beat itself,
to barge through a door marked Private.
        The list of what we want burns as we write it;
everyone starts to want a huge fire.

for bringing him here, for
counting the miles in gold.
The man in the next bed is
cast out of bronze. The man

next to him out of wax. Hold
him too long, he’ll furrow
and tantrum all night like
a candle. The man next to him

talks to his pillow. He blames it
for his dreams; his falling
& his crawling dreams. Why
did you show me tigers? Why

were my legs full of mud ?
The man next to him has
an answer, he listens to the roof
for angels. It’s raining

bishops & bastards, he yells
& hides his medicine cup
in the sheets. The orderlies
know better than to take it;

he’d only steal another
from the man in the next bed.
That man is the president
of Monaco, it says so

on his pectoral tattoo: I am
the president of Monaco.
In case of emergency, call
a jeweler. In the bed next to him

there’s a man who breaks
his fingers as a calling. God
tells him which to snap
or save. He leaves himself

one to point with, to accuse
the man in the next bed; the man
who built the hospital, who
doesn’t remember building it,

whose heart plays the machine
beside him, whose eyes stay
open, vacant as the next bed
& the next bed over.

I lay awake all night in that small hot room,
afraid of bats, afraid of spiders, afraid of mercy.

At dawn, light crept over everything,
golden oil, salve of loneliness.

I drove the rutted road beneath
my uncertainty. The sky was very high

and the road very bad, as the sun seared
the gold-dry hills, the red rock moonscape.

27 miles to the ghost town, the
abandoned silver mine that is New Idria.

Out of the lunar nowhere horses appeared,
threadbare, exhausted in their withers.

Riderless, the horses kept company with the sky,
a little muddy water, a little bitter

hay. The colt with its rolling eye
could not look at me. Horseless, I left,

unable to bear my own company.
I tried to spare a little mercy for them,

dropping the invisible whip
from between my teeth.

What were you supposed to do, with all this wakefulness?
you couldn’t put straw in it & drink it
you couldn’t package it up & mail it to a friend

Your eyes were open, they couldn’t be closed, & you were going out of your mind

*

It was one thing to crave the man’s body

and another to have it

the body, with all its useless addenda
its million incomprehensibilities

The atomizing body—limbs, hands, even particles of skin torn free

accelerating all around you

and nothing to stop it

Not even the sparrow’s nest in the palm outside the window.

*

The man wouldn’t surrender,
so you had to surrender. Your body,
your intemperate mind, which was always
coming loose from its mooring
and drifting out to sea—

He loved it when you crawled toward him, I’ll be your slave

And didn’t something in you respond?
Didn’t some smaller head inside your head look up,

and nod yes, and then you were smaller
all smaller, and you liked it.

*

The Lovers, reversed.
That was your card,
it kept coming up, over and over

every time. You would lay
the cards out, patient with your questions,
your commitment to the future—

and there they would be, the man & the woman
naked, clasping hands, with their garlands
and rainbows. Upside-down.

*

So literal-minded.
So determined to see things only one way, your way,
was how he used to put it,

leveraging his body over yours,

so he could fuck you harder—

*

The point wasn’t the point.
Or it wasn’t always the point.
Maybe the point was the balloons
that wilted for months in the tree last spring.
You were captivated by them, kept
thinking they’ll be there forever.
The red, green & the blue, hanging like
false blossoms in the topmost limb.
And then one day they were gone.
And so was the limb that held them.

*

Now what did you know?

rage/everything

rage so complicated, you got lost
when you tried to think it through

rage like a labyrinth

And maybe that was the solution—
not to become the girl or the hero,

but the beast with the bull’s head

lurking in the center of the maze.

of opened hands pursued me
through the winter garden:

my chest wrenched open, ribs like fingers,
open as graves in a world of snow.

You were the sun, and I was your moon,
you the larger circle, and I the lesser,

but the circle was too tight,
like golden rings around the necks of tigers

the pets of princes, and as I grew, the circle grew
tighter and tighter—

But I believed in it, the forfeit, the chill,

bitter eradication like poison plunged
into the veins, strychnine, mercury, arsenic love,

the old-fashioned cure: bride and bridegroom, now love, now vandal.

And so I was a wintry bride, gowned in ice, veiled in snow,
clad in the cold of virture, cold as home.

Here is my answer: obsidian lacquer.
Here is my answer: paint the moon black.

Give me time to re-align
my “practices and habits”

—by recognizing them.
He said. She said.

(At this point they tossed their velvet
voices in the trash.)

Talk to me like dirt.
Talk to me like wind.

Talk to me like sweat.
Use your plainest voice.

Walk with me into this new room.
Light a match, if you must see.

Do not pretend you have to name it,
limit it or know it.

Call this a riddle.
Let the room speak.

Call this permission.
Call this a prayer.

Do not say I do not love
the moon.

symmetrically, like icicles. Time itself
    was surrounded by leaves, was draped
       with a saddle, and horns. Above it,

the head of a deer. Above it,
    on a tiny balcony in sudden color,
       a general—and a fraulein, or queen—

in white, in red, in black. The balcony
    pleated like a skirt. The fraulein’s skirt
       un-pleated. Time

wanted to beat its wings, but had none.
    Had, instead, a couple of arrows,
       pointing at numbers. Time was caught

in a circle, but not for long.
    The circle lay against a piece of wood,
       and even that wood was a record

of longer time. One only had to look.
    Time was surrounded
       by a rabbit and an early conquistador

in knickers and a blunderbuss, but above
    the spinning of time, even the stocks
       of the guns, before our eyes,

were turning into birds.
    And the birds began to fly

At Gelson’s, side-stepping the desperate lungings of trolleys, Dani collected and paid for the buttermilk. She hefted Asha to her right hip and unlocked the car. Asha said, “Na na na.”

“Home now. Let’s go help Daddy with the table decorations.”

Dev assumed a zen-like state around the holidays. He revolved creatively around silverware and herb-scented candles. He was graceful and made everything look easy—unlike herself: hasty, untidy, uncoordinated and forgetful. All she’d had to remember was to make the bread and take care of Asha, and she’d forgotten about the bread while she was bathing Asha after a particularly emphatic diaper-overfill.

Dani knew about those who couldn’t forgive. Somewhere in the black catacombs of wall-scratched memories, her mother was still fleeing through the Burmese jungles, screaming curses over her shoulder at the Japanese. Dani was saved instead of the lost Sévres, Swedish whiskey tumblers, local servants and the largest compound in town. Her father, who had chosen to remain behind to support the resistance, was cursed for throwing away his life away in a prisoner of war camp instead of escaping to support his family.

Dani bubbled in the stew of her mother’s fear of colored people, including other Indians. Then there were her endless house-cleaning jobs so that Dani could wear a school uniform and attend Holy Cross High School in Kurla, Mumbai. Meanwhile, her mother’s chest infections grew worse.

She lived just long enough to see Dani win the scholarship. A month later, Dani walked through the American customs and immigration wearing jeans and a shalwar, each step further from the stories of the lost home in Rangoon, which had bloated with even more servants, fountains and silverware in each of her mother’s tellings.

She saw her mother in every person who seemed lost, who needed sympathy and a nice, hot cup of tea. She learned the different pitches of crying; those who cried on the intake of breath, those who sobbed huh-huh-huh; those who released their cries slowly, passionately, deep from their wounds, the swearers, the small-ornament throwers, those who see-sawed over her embroidered cushions and smeared snot surreptitiously, or so they thought. Understanding came to her like a slow corkscrew into a resistant cork. Lacking something meant you understood others who lacked. Lackées.

She found Dev at a party, unless it was he who found her. The circles under his eyes indicated his doctoral struggles. Although she didn’t know how to cook, she recognized someone who ought to eat large, nourishing meals. She gave him tea and bought samosas from an Indian restaurant. He was more careful with her cushions. Occasionally, he brought the samosas, or a Chinese take-out. He didn’t need anything else. His confidence was absolute, which contented her. She wouldn’t have to prop him up.

“Look, Asha. There’s that woman we saw on the way here,” Dani said. The squat woman,  her hands stuffed into a metallic-green baseball jacket, was still waiting at the bus stop outside Gelson’s. “Let’s give her something to be grateful for. Thanksgiving. Ha ha.”

Asha said, “Mama.”

Dani rolled down her window. “Can I give you a lift?”

The woman walked over, rolling to one side like a torpedoed submarine, opened the passenger door and sat in the car as if she’d been waiting specifically for Dani. “Northridge.” She banged the door shut. “Thanks,” she added, some invisible mother prodding her.

“It’s a cold day to be waiting for a bus. Are there any running?”

The woman looked at her as though she’d missed out on cerebral development. “Some.”

Asha, also social, said, “Ba-by.”

“This is my daughter, Asha.”

The woman nodded, didn’t look around to coo at Asha who, with almond shaped eyes and curly hair, was prime cooing material. Dani glanced sideways at the woman. Bitter-brown skin was folded between her brows, her mouth pulled in, still nodding.

The woman said, “You live here?”

“Near here. We don’t usually go to Gelson’s, but it’s closer than Ralphs. You work there?”

“Six year. Long way from Northridge.”

“I can imagine. Can you car-pool?”

Again the look as though Dani had missed the common sense gene. Having often been the target of ignorant remarks, Dani was mortified about producing the same.

“We don’t have car. None of us.” This was a tribe of car-less people somehow more noble, more capable. They could withstand earthquakes, floods, vandalism, landlords who were like Dani. They could make do with sheets of plastic, four poles driven into the ground, strips of cotton. Their army of shanties would rise up and march down to Woodland Hills.

The telegraph lines swooped across the roads as they drove through Northridge. The woman said, “Pull over here.”

Dani checked her rearview mirror. The road, like nearly all the roads in this neighborhood, was empty. She smiled over her shoulder at Asha, spread the smile to the woman. The woman was holding a  gun aimed at Dani’s stomach. “Money.”

Dani smiled into the gun. She kept both hands on the wheel. She thought, I can get her before she turns around for Asha.

“Money.” The woman’s voice had become high.

Dani kept her hands still. She thought, She’s never done this before. “It’s in my bag. My bag’s in the backseat.”

“Get it.”

“Don’t hurt the baby.”

“I don’t care your baby.”

Dani parked the car and turned around for her bag. Asha said, “Mama.” Dani smiled and touched Asha’s hand. “Ash-ash.”

Asha said, “Um mum-mum.”

“Get the money.”

“I’m getting it.”

“Don’t talk your baby. I don’t care your baby. I have many these thing.” The woman showed a handful of bullets and put them back in her metallic-green pocket. Dani sat with the bag on her lap. “Open slow.” Dani pulled out her wallet and offered it to the woman. She pulled back. “I don’t want all these. Just money.”

Dani handed over the bills, thirty-two dollars. The woman sat with the bills in her lap. “More.”

“That’s all I have.”

“Fifteen more.”

“I don’t have any more. I have some change.” She counted out eighty-seven cents.

The woman held the change tightly. “More.” She looked as if she’d got the courage up to ask for a raise. She lifted the pistol.

“We can find an ATM. How much do you need? Please don’t hurt us.”

“Why you carry so small?”

The pistol was shaking. The woman put it back in her pocket. The other hand was still fisted around the change. She cried, snorting back the phlegm. Dani fought the urge to put an arm around her.

A story in hiccups. Two missed work days because her youngest son was sick; short of rent money and the landlord wouldn’t accept a late payment.

They found an ATM and Dani withdrew three hundred dollars. The woman was furious in denial. Only forty-seven dollars. They compromised with sixty dollars since they couldn’t make the change. The woman made Dani write down her post box address so she could mail the back the difference.

Dani said, “How many children do you have?”

“Three. A girl, a boy, and Paulo small, like your.”

Dani felt the tears coming and tried to hold the woman’s hand, but the hard fingers drew away. They weren’t sisters. Asha started to cry.

“Take.” The woman put the pistol in Dani’s lap.

“I can’t take this.” It was Dani’s turn to be appalled. “We don’t have guns in the house. I have a baby.”

“I don’t care your baby. You don’t care my baby.” The angry skin between the brows was back and she had to raise her voice above Asha’s wails.

Again the denial of sisterhood, no crossing of race, class, any chasm which could have been bridged by that frantic maternal bonding seen in parks and Mommy and Me classes.

The woman stepped out of the car, the sixty dollars stuffed into her pants pocket. Dani tried once more. “What’s your name?” She thought it was pointless even as she spoke. She was only good for cash and as a repository for the gun.

“Alenoushka.”

Dani had expected Beatriz, Inés, Conseulo, Marisol. The woman shrugged one shoulder and walked away, a small undulating metallic-green hillock.

Dani turned the car around and drove fast. She slowed down on Nordhoff. No one was following her. The woman only had their post box address, not even their name. It was only as she turned on to Topanga Canyon, with Asha’s hungry cry settling into a serious bawl at every red light, that she realized the real problem sat in her lap, a dull, heavy, metal lump. She glanced down at it occasionally. She hadn’t touched it yet, not even to throw it into the passenger seat. What if it went off? She gingerly picked it up and placed it next to her bag on the front seat.

Through Asha’s screams, Dani shouted, “It’s ok, Ash-ash. We’re nearly home.”

As she pulled the car into the garage, Dev opened the back door, “Everything okay?” He heard Asha and came to get her from the car. “Hey, girly. It’s okay. Daddy’s here.” He called over his shoulder, “Come and look at the table.” He didn’t seem to notice they’d been away for hours, in a different country, a different time zone where the clock had stopped on the edge of a gun barrel.

While Dev fed Asha her watermelon and cereal, Dani walked around the table admiring the centerpiece. “You’ve outdone yourself. I love the tiger lilies.”

Dev put Asha down for her nap while Dani made sandwiches for lunch. He came into the kitchen and found her crying over the cucumber. “What happened?”

“We picked up someone at the bus stop. She had—she was a bit weird.”

“You picked up a stranger with Asha in the car?”

She couldn’t tell him. He’d call the police. Problem fixed. Dani washed the lunch plates. I am a middle-aged Indian woman with an eight month-old baby and a stolen gun.

In the night, pretending that she’d heard Asha crying, she tip-toed to the garage. She found the gun on the passenger seat and put it in the trunk, under the carpet that covered the spare tire. She had never held a gun before and the thought of finding out whether it was loaded and having to remove the bullets made her slam the trunk harder than she’d intended.

Back in bed, Dev said, “What are you doing?”

“I couldn’t remember if I’d put the diaper bag back in the car.”

She thought, I am a middle-aged woman who lies to her husband.

The following week a brown envelope, addressed in firm, round capitals, arrived at their post box address while the gun sat in the trunk, a hungry worm feeding on Dani.

In the days after, during the tumble of dressing and undressing, the arguments, the making up, the make-up removal, the gun lay under her thoughts like something moving in stagnant water. Occasionally, it bolted into her consciousness, like the squirrel she’d seen, half-run over, its back legs jumping.

In the garage, she opened the trunk and moved the carpet aside and looked at it. Dull, squat, ugly. It was one of those tv movie moments where the woman would say, “I don’t know why I just didn’t tell my husband about (jangled chord) the gun.”

She picked it up. It was heavy. How did people fire these things? She looked for something which might be a safety catch. She wrapped it in an old Oingo Boingo t-shirt of Dev’s and replaced it in the trunk.

“Come on Asha, let’s go to the park.” Asha gummed a kiss on Dani’s left ear. It’s all right for you, Dani thought. You don’t have a gun to get rid of. The sun moved in and out of the clouds as they drove out of the valley. After slowing down at a mini-mall, Dani pulled away, unable to see herself casually throwing a potentially loaded gun into a public garbage container. What if someone saw her? What if some child got hold of it?

She drove through Calabasas and got on the northbound freeway. She was singing a nursery rhyme to Asha when the maroon Excursion moved up behind them. Since there was plenty of room for maneuvering, Dani didn’t pay attention at first. Eventually she noticed the Excursion’s grill was closer. She looked in her mirror but couldn’t see who was driving. She took her foot off the accelerator. This usually encouraged tail-gaters to change lanes and overtake. The grill continued to approach. Dani glanced at her speedometer. Forty-five mph. Any closer and the grill would nudge her fender. The consciousness of what was in the trunk made her signal and pull over to the right lane. She watched the maroon Excursion plough ahead and wished the driver well of it. She laughed. If only the guy knew what was in her trunk.

She exited at Lost Hills and saw the Excursion waiting at the light in the right lane. She pulled up adjacent to it.

The woman leaned out to shout, “You coulda caused an accident.”

Dani rolled her window down. “I beg your pardon?”

“Take driving lessons, asshole.”

The light changed and the Excursion turned right. No you don’t. Dani veered into the right lane and chased the Excursion. The woman pulled over to the curb. Dani parked the Honda behind and jumped out. The woman stayed in her car, which meant Dani had to look up into her sunglasses hedged with gold and black corkscrew curls.

Dani took a breath. “You were tail-gating me.”

“Listen, bitch, I did you the courtesy of pulling over.”

“You call that a courtesy? I’ll show you courtesy.” Dani turned away and walked to the back of the Honda.

The woman opened her door and stepped out and then saw Dani standing with her hand on the trunk. She held her palms up, and backed away. “I’m sorry. Oh christ, you’ve got a kid in there. Look, I’m sorry. I’m leaving. Okay?” The woman got in her car, fumbled it into life and screeched away.

Asha was crying. Dani got in the back and held her until she quieted. “I’m sorry, Ash-Ash. I’m sorry.”

The drive home was slow and fast by turns, fast-forwarding through parts of Las Virgenes and Mulholland. What was she doing driving Asha around with a gun in the car? She thought, I am a middle-aged Indian mother with a cowboy complex.

She put Asha on the living room carpet with her milk bottle. She went into the kitchen, stood against the kitchen counter and cried into the tea-towel. It was time to tell Dev about the gun. The phone rang.

“Alenoushka.” The bitter-brown voice said the four syllables, hatred in every one of them. “You get your money?”

“Yes. How did you get this number?”

“You got the gun?”

Dani paused too long before she said, “No.”

Alenoushka made some gutteral noise which could have been scorn or pity. “One time before, that gun got in accident with someone. So they looking for it. I take it back.”

Dani had started crying again. “Who’s looking for it? Did you kill someone?”

Again the gutteral noise, but this time it sounded as though Alenoushka was clearing her throat. “I gotta go. I call you.” She hung up.

Dani threw up in the sink. Asha called, “Mama. Baba. Bye.”

When Dev arrived home he sent Dani to bed. “Baby blues hitting hard?” She thought, I’m going to tell him I nearly pulled a gun on someone. Instead, she told him a modified version which had the Excursion driver chasing her down Lost Hills. “You must be some kind of weirdo magnet. Did you get her plate number? We should report this. Chasing a car with a baby in the back? Jesus. Crazy bitch probably had a gun. You were lucky, sweetheart.”

Dani lifted the sheet and inhaled a thick smell, like some kind of metallic jam. She drew a bath and found two of the Release ‘n Relax sachets. She watched the swirl of dark brown granules and thought of blood.

The next morning, the squirming in her stomach was worse. She listened to Dev humming in the shower. When phone rang downstairs, she didn’t know whether to pick it up or stick her head over the toilet. She stood in the kitchen breathing hard into the receiver as if she’d been running.

“You know this street Yolanda and Roscoe? Near the hospital? There is a beauty salon. I meet you.”

“When?”

“Now.”

Dani’s stomach jumped. Asha. Dev. “I can’t come now. I can come this afternoon.”

“No. My kids back from school in the afternoon.”

“Give me a couple of hours. I’ll meet you at ten.”

There was a sound as though a vacuum cleaner hose had been held to the phone and then, “Okay. Ten.” She hung up.

Dani called Flora who was free until lunchtime to take care of Asha. She knew why Alenoushka despised her. Rich people called the babysitter.

About an hour later, Flora padded in. Asha held her arms out and said, “Aya, aya.” Flora flipped her blue and blonde braid over her shoulder, scooped up Asha and went over to the stereo. Selecting Gypsy Kings and Basement Jaxx CDs, Flora nodded vaguely at Dani’s list of naps, yogurt and reminders about the diaper rash cream.

“I’ll be back by twelve.” She bent to kiss Asha, who didn’t seem to notice. “Bye, girls.”

Dani reversed out of the garage blinking away tears. It was good that Asha liked Flora. They would have a great morning, singing, telling stories, going to the park while she, the mother, delivered an illegal weapon back to the person who threatened her with it in the first place.

She drove on unfamiliar surface streets, imagining the gun was growing. The rear of the car would begin to sway and dip until she was stopped by the police and asked to open the trunk; the gun would lie there, the size of a small cannon, its fat mouth yawning obscenely up at them.

The streets had become wide, the tarmac gouged, the double yellow lines faded and chipped. The sun made everything look grey, shining a bare light onto an old face. Billboards offered unlikely opportunities and some, seeming ashamed, had started to peel themselves away. Trees leaned thin, bed-heads of leaves hanging desolate. Tight-faced stores seemed to elbow each other; small electrical appliances, lap top repairs, a pawnshop, a liquor store with the usual black iron bars and a lotto sign outside.

At the corner of Yolanda she pulled into a pink and green mini mall with five potted palms placed at intervals, like nervous girls at a party. Above the nail salon was a silver and black sign, Nail On Silver Girl. The mall was surrounded with pink paving in a vain attempt to distance it from the huddle of commerce on Roscoe. There was also a spa and mini gym with a discount offer for you and a friend. She had no money, but idly wondered if she could request a facial at gunpoint.

She breathed slowly. I will not turn the engine on. Alenoushka wouldn’t find her, a soft middle-class woman, sitting in her air-conditioned car. Instead, sweat ran down between her breasts and pooled around her stomach. Alenoushka appeared wearing a blue baseball jacket. The same lurching gait, the same eyebrow divided by a scowl.

“Let’s go. I tell you where.”

“Can’t I just give it to you here?” Dani recognized the pitying look. She turned out of the parking lot and prepared to lose count of the left and right turns.

She asked, “You’re not working today?”

“I work double shift sometimes so I stay home with Paulo. My neighbor take him so I can get you.”

Dani felt the invisible shifting and re-shifting of levels and weaves so that somehow everything could be accommodated. My neighbor downstairs, my cousin on the next block, a doctor’s appointment, an illness. She had Flora. If Flora couldn’t make it, then someone else would, perhaps even one of these cousins, these neighbors.

They parked outside the only two-storey building on a street with tottering, elderly blocks in afternoon colors; old red, dark pink, gray. Alenoushka  led Dani up two flights of concrete steps.

The building flowered on itself. The doors faced into a large, open courtyard. Bird feeders hung from palm trees, potted ferns and hanging baskets of flowers. Some of the trees reached up into the space between the doors on the second floor. The blue and gray tiles were wet from a recent hosing and Dani felt as though she’d stepped into a greenhouse. The faint shadow of painted over graffiti looked like strange, beautiful sea-plants.

Surprised, she said, “It’s lovely.”

Alenoushka made her gutteral laughing sound and dug out her keys. She opened the front door and a girl with a baby spoke in Spanish. Alenoushka took the baby, spoke back. Two young children, eating handfuls of Rice Krispies from a large bowl in front of the television, stood up and went out with the girl.

Alenoushka shifted the baby to her left shoulder and picked up a small, brown zip-top bag. “You put in here and bring to me.”

Dani pushed her black leather tote over her shoulder, swung the brown bag by its loop, and walked down to the car. After days of misery and indecision, it turned out to be simple. Put the gun in the bag and hand it over.

She got into the car and threw both bags onto the passenger seat. The brown bag’s lips split open and a plastic Vons bag shuffled out, cascading bullets across the seat and onto the floor. At the end of the street, the muzzle of a police car nosed around the corner. Dani pulled her dupata scarf off and flung it across the passenger seat. She started the car and pulled into the driveway just past the building. She inched her way along, scraping the bushes alternately on the left and right. In her rearview mirror, the police car eased past the building.

Behind the building a row of empty carports, sagged together, like the end of a Friday night’s drinking. She jerked to a stop and crammed the bullets back into the bag. Clutching the bag to her chest, she got out, opened the trunk and lifted the carpet. The t-shirt had shifted and she could see the gun’s nozzle. She stuffed the t-shirt bundle into the bag, zipped it shut, and shoved the whole thing into her tote.

She walked back into the courtyard, between the flowering plants and up through the calm green forest of Alenoushka’s building. The front door was unlatched. She called, “Hallo?” to let Alenoushka know she was back.

In a corner, a short man watched her. She had time to notice something shiny in his hand. The sneeze saved her. She covered her face immediately and made a big deal of retrieving a tissue.

“Hallo, you must be Mr., er, Mr.?”

The man slid out of the corner, hands in his pockets, the shiny thing concealed. He said one word. “You?”

“I’m Dani. I’m a friend.” She exaggerated her Indian accent, thrusting the foreign-ness in front of her like a flag.

“Who tell you to come here?” The voice was hoarse, the shiny nostrils dilating, sniffing her out.

Dani was bright. “Alenoushka.” She remembered a social worker friend telling her that if someone could be made to sit down, they were less likely to get angry or attack you. Breathe, breathe. Smile. Breathe. “May I sit down?”

He jerked his head. She sat and tried not to clutch the tote. He straddled one of the sofa arms. He should have looked ridiculous, his short legs barely reaching the floor, his ugly, white tennis shoes scuffing the carpet. Where was Alenoushka? Had she run off with the baby? What was she to do with this guy who could easily knife her, if that thing he had was a knife?

The man smiled at her, showing the uneven teeth of an old rat. “Very good. Very nice.” He stood up. “Now, you tell me what’s going on.”

Her stomach jumped.

“You think you so great? You come here pretending this and pretending that. You think I am stupid?” He kicked at her chair. “Who are you?” He kicked again.

She jumped up. She was taller. For one victorious moment, she let him feel that. She stood staring down at him, holding her bag against her. She could feel his small, thick anger bulging out at her, the grease on his neck was sweat. He smelled of fear and bullying.

Very quietly she said, “Take one step closer and I’ll tear your fucking balls off.” She felt the anger, unused, muscular, rearing up. She actually spat on his shoes. Her inner housewife recoiled.

His eyes widened and then he went very still. It was in this moment that something would happen. Her fingers closed around the gun. She didn’t need to lift it out. She could shoot straight through the bag, as long as it was loaded. Was it loaded?

He said, “You not so nice now.” He was almost complaining, but he was searching her to see if she meant it, if she could do it, whether she did have a gun in that bag.

The front door pushed open and Alenoushka stepped in. She looked at the man and stepped between him and Dani. She pulled the tote off Dani’s shoulder and the gun came out still in Dani’s hand, the head of a snake.

The man jumped, held both hands up. “Don’t shoot. I’m going” He edged out of the door and said to Alenoushka, “You rich friends all crazy. She shoot you one time. You see.”

Dani kept the gun aimed at the closed door. Alenoushka took it from Dani and put it back in the brown bag. She took Dani’s arm and led her to the kitchen. “Sit.” Dani sat. Alenoushka cut up an orange, put it on a plate and placed it on the table between them.

Alenoushka jerked her head towards the door. “My husband. He come here for money. You scare him good. Maybe he leave us alone some time.” She smiled at Dani.

Dani ate a piece of orange. It was sweet.

Alenoushka got up from the table. “Don’t get big big ideas. This gun will be vanish tonight.”

Dani picked up her tote. “I wasn’t going to tell anyone.”

“You tell you husband?”

“No.”

Alenoushka shouted with laughter. “Rich people.” She shook her head and offered Dani more orange. “You know the way home? No?” She drew a map with on a torn piece of paper. Dani looked at the strange curving lines, like clouds, like the leaking eye of an egg yolk.

She rolled down the window to feel the breeze on her face, to smell the streets as she drove, to sense the change as she moved from one place to another. As she turned right, the smells altered. There was no more smell of earth and oil and something like burnt popcorn which had floated around the streets near Alenoushka’s block. Exhaust fumes blasted through the window and the fat breath of a bus passed her.

On Winnetka she caught the smell of green from a tree hanging off the back of a truck, its branches protruding from the black canvas. The wide roads had never looked so beautiful. But as the truck turned the corner the canvas snagged on a metal awning painted to look like pink lace. Some of the foliage tore off, clumps of leaves falling like dead birds, and the canvas was ripped away.

She turned onto Mulholland and the smell of cut grass filtered in along with the comfortable buzz of leaf blowers and lawn mowers. In a few minutes she would be holding Asha and breathing in the perfect smell of her baby hair. As she rounded the corner she let in the clutch a little too sharply and felt a sudden dislocation, a jolt between worlds, a sense of arriving somewhere strange, as if she were in the wrong place.

A hatchback howls by and the doe scuttles
uphill, dust clouds rising phantomlike.
Then the fence, the miscalculated leap, the animal
speared and clattering on the iron bars.

The doe bleeding out her life means little
to the boy who finds her crucified.
With a twig he pokes the black orb of her eye,
summons his brothers and together

they pummel the animal with rocks and dirt,
sticks and dirt, the blade of a shattered bottle
and more dirt, handfuls flung and falling
in veils of brown over the doe’s face.

When twilight turns the sky to plum, the boys
pedal home, quick as leopards on their bikes.
Their hands in the sink and a shushing faucet
before grace at the dinner table, before Father

divides the meatloaf and Mother spoons out the peas.
Manners always, the discipline of a backhand
if one should speak with food inside his mouth.
Then one speaks with food inside his mouth.

risky/cosmopolitan, though as baldly sunned)
warned us wind is rare summers.
Obviously

she is never homebound weekdays, 3-
ish, when (as if brewed in a pot made from heat
and

hide, then swung loose by an iron arm) wind arrives,
ripping down dried palm fronds like skirts from un-
suspecting

spinsters forever pathetically standing by;
leaf-trashing dervish be-
heading

non-native plants, snapping ribs of my simple shade
umbrella; wolf’s breath, hurting specific
treasures

cherished earlier, when my child and I played
so well. Chimes panic, dead-drop from the orange
tree

outside his modest bedroom’s window; my hair
is stolen from the weak clip; ox shoulders
clumsy

my watering of scorched bush and weed and I wonder:
where have we moved now, 13 miles closer to my sea
though

barely inching across basin scavenged by bored poets
(tattlers, thieves); odds-off country; even the shaggy
potato

vine’s tangled locks flung ruthlessly aside—the new grave’s
squat-rock headstone glaring, freed, reminder of the one
senseless

casualty of this change (O sacrifice, you who never knew, etc.).
And when it’s finished its donkey’s yawn over my yard, wind
reaches

for an outrage of thunderheads, rolling them peak-white
over sky pressed into a tryst with obscurity—one
un-

mined poetic scream summing up the rest
of this year’s ordinary calamities—
wind

vanishing, returning, breathing heat-shiny gems
I am stupid to dismiss: a child’s treasures, a death,
chimes,

my
own heat-cracked, silently spun headlines petrifying
in mid-summer’s heave.

A grey grain of cat litter. A-
nother. Beneath the piano’s eerie
claw-legged arc, blackened fruit
peel, a stray unpopped corn kernel
shiny as a watered pearl. Outside,
the lot with its crawl of machines
and men, blithe plumes of dust
veiling rattled windows framing
a yellow crane lumbering on: sad
beast, savage sucked out of it.
In my quick, private silence:

Dvorak, always his No. 9,
No. 9, No. 9. That day?
O my fine drugged hours,
swirly room, suns burst-
ing locked centers, peace
reigning in a drip, in a drip in-
to me as he slumbered or stared,
making even the used bed glow.
Together we were stunning
by dark or day, tight in a bond
of fresh deeds; envied. I pocket
the litter grain, kernel, the lot
nattering on: tremors, another
ghastly beast passing, wetted
dirt cramming slow
jaws. He is riveted

by the ADD puppet on the screen.
Look: miniature gaze of a minute
man processing an actor’s lines—
not one year accomplished since those friends
I loved quailed from the 3D O
of expanding belly, from miracle-
workings, unable to express why
in language other than im-
penetrable as I rocked him,
as I rock him into day, into night
in this shook hole (shock-
hole), continually saving a life.
The puppet laughs, red as a devil,
jittery-bold giggles testing jump-
ing minds of those gone rock-
ing to sway, rock, sway.
Today: O my tiny poverty!
O secret strain!

The day’s too dust-laden for speech.
Wind sings through what falls out of use,
a refrain of discordant notes
threading rusted pump rods, fencing,
a screen door beyond the back porch.

as when, last night, the stop of my stomach
slammed shut on my throat, latched & unforgiving,
hardening into a smooth, solid stone.
As when, our words (once lovely and lithe)
fell upon their swords, cutting into ribbons
all we so cunningly wove. And coursing
love never did loom smooth, but still I
did not leave. My hands found yours. And—somehow—
we were granted a reprieve: confusion
cooled and love once again surfaced, settling
my stomach back in place, drawing your lips
back to mine, and what sweet ardor, what
comely grace, in lovers reunited
after so cruel an almost-fate.

Each day she’d confess,
after I’d changed her bedpan
and begun to undress her,
that the margin between sanity
and her life was expanding,
and her only desire
was to fly kites.

I felt superior when I was with her,
an evolved ape washing her feet,
but I wasn’t much more than a basket case,
mainlining drugs meant
for her collapsing veins.

She never asked for them anyway,
preferring to curve her splotched,
purple fingers around my shoulder
to draw me into a sloppy embrace.

I thought of drugs as progress,
but she could reach maximum hum
from the smell of my hair.

She was all I ever knew of wisdom.

Then he grabbed the .45,
hustled us onto the porch
where a young wife stood,
hair impossibly black,
a dot of rouge marking
her forehead.

[to the sound of boots and orchard rustle
the young wife led us inside]

We weren’t afraid, Shelby and I,
though we were afraid of most everything.
But she must have been, knowing,
two daughters of her own to think of,
now two strange girls. No language between us.

It was a long time until they came back.
Dad, Bob the Hindu, and two others.
From the kitchen, broken
English and laughter, bottles clinked and passed,
Jack Daniels, someone’s cheap rum.  Hallelujah
in Dad’s thick Southern drawl.

        [Later Dad would testify
        that what had gone down was over walnuts
        and one of the outlaws had come to Jesus,
        pistol barrel in his mouth.]

While our father shared the Lord,
the young wife without words
brushed the first strokes of color
across our ragged nails.

Under red bulb sing Siouxsie raw.

Razor. Alcohol. Swab.

Adolescent ward 1: Stiff against seat vinyl, a new eighteen, it’s January.
Not sure my car will make it, too much ice,
but I promised and you’re waiting and
I do make it (as we always do in these stories
until we don’t).

Someone lets me in, even though I’m unauthorized and,
curled into your side, no one notices I don’t belong
for five hours.

You should seriously think about getting committed,
you say too cheerfully, taking my hand in your pianist fingers,
and I think of my phobia of needles and the way your face
is exposed now without lipstick and loose powder,
glad nothing I do to myself can be seen on the outside.

Adolescent ward 2: You’ve been hallucinating yourself in coffins.
I’m still eighteen but it’s not a new eighteen,
the school psychologist calls me out of class twice a week
to ask if I’m going to kill myself. Yes, I want to tell him,
it’s catching.

The shrink at the hospital won’t release you until the insurance
runs out, so you’re having a long stay at a place with a name like
an amusement park. The cool nurse takes you for trips to the corner market
to buy Marlboro Lights, you make out with a guy
who tells you you’re pretty. Your first kiss is between
rounds of medication.

Carly hung Tina’s doll. She’s a witch, you whisper on
metered time, and more when you earn enough good behavior
points for an hour pass on a Sunday afternoon. I believe you.
We both believe in witchcraft, and someday when you get out
of this shithole, we’re going to talk about it over scorched coffee
in tall-seated booths at a 24-hour diner that sounds like it’s named after someone’s mom or daughter.

America, I stain my lips
to think of you.

A tender fruit. A crazed mirror.

Thimble. Needle. Thread.

Hark, hark, the dogs do bark
Desperate Tony’s come to town
*

At the edge
where disbelief wells up
where blocks of warehouses mutate
into identical stucco boxes—Palm Court
nailed to a blank face
the methman cometh

when the hurly-burly starts off Victory
nobody waiting for the midnight hour
the dark not juvenile
the methman cometh

like a rat without a tail
a whistling flail
a monster in a mansuit, tools in his pocket
the methman cometh

takes the stairs two at a time
pounding the door

and the threshing begins
*

and I am the wheat, cold and naked but not innocent
*

RATS IN THE KITCHEN SURE ARE MEAN
*

Wish I may, wish I might
Crawl inside this plant tonight

creation empty but for me an’ a
dying philodendron       still breathing
mossy breath cool on my bruise-eye
exhaling damp languor   dark
droplets    green smell of rain
close your eyes, girl, close your eyes

Wish List
a. to hide a hundred years inside this sugar shack
b. chlorophyll transmigration
c. verde, que te quiero…

*

Naked as we are all naked before a gun
*

In the end Tony’s the only one who can still run,
holding his head a globe of red
and his teeth salted the blacktop
and the chain link trembled
and the trash bins gaped—
clutching a dozen roses he ran
his bouquets becoming fountains
his fountains, rivers

I cried a river 4 U

Chloroform moon wades a culvert

(He thought it would be fun,thought Kubla Khan decreed it special for him and his girl,his own pleasure dome where Meth,the sacred river,ran through caverns measureless to man)

RATS IN THE KITCHEN
*

A vowel rises like a fat crow
tea-kettle of tar
noir wings flapping O
O, utmost sound
in the beginning is O       before
words escape
words vault for the walls
tumble to the carpet

green shag floor of hell

I am the wheat, cold and naked

he’s killing me  KILLING ME

fellow inmates listening
through walls paper thin

water grieving over rubble, water grieving in the reeds
*

Box of bristle
chipped tin box where he keeps a grimace
mega-what chemical impulse
magicks a gun into his yes hand  Take off your clothes    Ladonna’s gonna watch
all of us holding our gaze very careful
nobody knows for sure who’s born to die
in the middle of LA tonight

and I am the wheat, cold and naked but not innocent
my skin seared and paper thin    slowgrind on scared skin

ashes, ashes, we all fall down

SURE ARE MEAN
*

I know the rats are involved in what I know

fellow inmates, we are pent
we are furrowed, scythed, flailed   we are spent
my fellow inmates we are winnowed                 we are threshed

we are the wheat

the rats are involved
*

do- si-do of throwing blows
chock a block
until the whole thing moves like a swarm of bees
down the stairs      onto the street
where Tony gets his tire iron       nothing reasonable about Tony
no limits to force     a tire iron in his hand is carnival
the wildest ride         pure sunshine
*

green algae-bloom moon splashes through the LA River

you say you’re lonely     you cry the whole night through
close your eyes, girl
it’s over
I’m over it

So Los Angeles, come on
and cry me a concrete spillway
cuz I cried
a   grimy   river

over
you

***
KY: I read something you had said about how difficult it is to navigate narrative information and still keep the lyricism alive. Can you talk about how you managed to do this so successfully in Jane: A Murder?

MN: The best I could do was getting very small, having one detail, having the whole poem be about one moment. It’s so hard when you get the: ”and this happened and then this and this and this”—but it’s also hard because you have to resist the heavy symbolism that comes with isolating particular narrative moments.

KY: One of the reasons I love Jane so much is that everything slows down and there’s a kind of montage quality to the book, the placement of details work together to make something bigger.

MN: It took a lot of re-arranging on my floor. I wrote a lot of poems for a long time circulating around the murder of my aunt and not knowing what they were. A lot of those got glommed into the section of the book called “Two Eclipses”—which is about my childhood. I wanted to take that section out entirely at one point, just hating it and wanting the book to about Jane—it’s called Jane and it’s going to be just her story. But then everyone who read it felt like it was more voyeuristic to not have me in it. I really resisted because I didn’t want to write about its effect on me.

Up until giving Jane to the press, the book could have gone a lot of different ways. Now it feels very much like it’s supposed to be. It’s like with any book, up until the moment it’s finished, it could always be otherwise. Any book that is made up of movable pieces, which all poetry collections are, is hard because you feel like you’re moving toward some Platonic ideal, toward the logic the book is supposed to have. But, in a way, it’s kind of like when you were talking about your project, the book began to echo—of course trauma makes this more apparent, but it’s true of any life—that at any moment things could have been otherwise. You come up against these very existential questions: is there a book that should be written, was this fate, or is it just this thing that happened and there are millions of things that could have edged it off course.

I was recently writing this book about the color blue that’s coming out this fall. It’s kind of paragraph chunks, prose, but they are all numbered. The editor thought it would be a good experiment to print out each paragraph on a separate page and re-arrange them, but there were too many of them. The book is over one hundred pages and by doing that there were over 250 pages. I just thought, I’m at the edge of my montage era. It was infinite. It was a good exercise. I did eventually see the parts that could become more enlivened through some re-arranging. When people want to write something experimental they sometimes think the main feature is that it shouldn’t be chronological. But Jane and The Red Parts are both, in some sense, chronological—they’re just not linear, per se. Chronology, to me, has come to mean the art of charting the mysterious and perhaps illusory movement of events through space-time, which is always a necessary and unruly task.

KY: In The Red Parts, you talk about Ellroy’s project and this idea of what happens when the road, the motivation or drive for these projects, sort of falls out beneath you. You write: “Conventional wisdom is that we dredge up family stories to find out more about ourselves, to pursue that all-important goal of ‘self-knowledge,’ to catapult ourselves, like Oedipus, down the track that leads to the revelation of some original crime. Some original truth. Then we gouge our eyes out in shame, run screaming into the wilderness, and plagues cease to rain down on our people. Fewer people talk about what happens when this track begins to dissolve, when the path starts to become indistinguishable from the forest.” Like you say, Ellroy did a lot of hard work in writing My Dark Places. I loved that he took these cross-sections of his story, how he dug into the history of the sheriff’s department in order to tell the story and how he situated the story in the terrain of Southern California. But I thought one of the most interesting things about his book was his relationship with the idea of his mother, the mother that he’s re-created on the page. But it didn’t seem, in the book, that he was clear that this is merely a representation and that he may not have gotten any closer to anything other than a more detailed and complex version of this mother. I don’t know if that’s what you were getting at…

MN: It’s funny because people who have read The Red Parts and want to talk about Ellroy’s My Dark Places often say, “I think I liked his book more than you did.” I didn’t say I didn’t like the book. What I recall from Ellroy’s book is his fantasy of fucking his mutilated mother. I think people who haven’t read his book think I’m making a critique when I say that, but I’m restating what Ellroy said. It’s always a relief when someone just says it. Now we’re dealing with that. The real problem I had with My Dark Places was that, by the end, it feels deliriously out of control—all this good work came smashing up against the idea that if he found out what happened to his mother it would be resolved. What’s memorable about that book is the double shadow, which I think any time you’re writing about someone who is not you, you get. It’s the person the writer has made up, that figure, and then the shadow, the total void. You just can’t help but think, “who was this person?”

KY: If you place the two books side by side: Ellroy ends it with his position of power and he hasn’t solved the case. You actually get a resolution, and you’re still skeptical of that resolution.

MN: My aunt’s murder took place a long time in the past (1969)—so long ago that it’s almost as if the people who participated in the events are entirely different people now. I would probably have felt differently if I had been 110% convinced of three things: one, of the accused’s guilt; two, that he were likely to harm someone again; and three, that the American prison system offers an appropriate means of addressing or redressing crimes. While I was writing The Red Parts, I followed with intense interest local and global forums for addressing grievous acts, especially forums that do not resemble our current system. I was, still am, very interested in systems of redress and accountability that have been theorized or implemented in, say, South Africa, in Rwanda, in Australia. And now, of course, the United States has its own need for a truth commission of sorts, and/or a prosecutorial system, to deal with its own use of torture.

On a personal level, back to my aunt’s case, it’s difficult to relive these tragedies. And there’s always the question of do you want to redo this. I know my grandfather was not up for it. I think it would have been all the same to him to simply leave it. The main kind of resolution you’d want is admission—an eye to eye. In a way, you could let somebody walk if there was this eye to eye. There’s not a lot of satisfaction the other way. Even if the person is guilty and in prison, you know they are not doing a lot of reckoning. And then they can, OJ style, convince themselves that it didn’t occur, and that’s not satisfying. I don’t spend much time thinking about Gary. A friend of mine told me that he saw him on Good Morning America before his last appeal. There are moments where I think maybe I should be working on his behalf to get him out of jail, should evidence contrary to his conviction surface. But, at a certain point, an individual person doesn’t charge somebody with a crime; the state charges them with a crime. At times you have to lovingly detach because there’s nothing you can do.

KY: You talk in the interview you gave with Jane Carr about the female gaze, and I’m wondering what the female gaze has meant to you in these projects?

MN: I don’t have a TV, and when I was recently away on a trip and staying alone in a hotel, I found myself watching back-to-back episodes of Law and Order. They all focus around this mutilated, raped girl as the trope. I thought a lot about that when I was writing Jane. What’s interesting about this image of the mutilated or hurt girl is that when I moved to LA I heard of these shows using this image as a way of getting around censors: Like if a female body is dead you can show more of it. I was thinking about the movie Boys Don’t Cry where there’s a scene when Chloe Sevigny is having an orgasm and they were going to give the movie an NC-17 because of the extended nature of the orgasm. I was thinking about that—the live female in prolonged pleasure—compared to all the crazy stuff we see on TV. I mean this is super basic, feminism 101, and we all know it, but what was interesting to me is that there are these strictures that exist on paper that are determining what’s permissible for us to see. Somebody just made it up. And someone enforces it.

When growing up, you have to find, depending on your sexuality, what turns you on. But you’re also always being titillated by sexual content anywhere it’s found, and it interests me how none of us can know what fantasies or what kind of sexualities would grow in and around a different culture. Feminists have thought for a long time about what that might look like. I don’t know what it would look like, so I could never guess. When I was growing up the big movies I remember were River’s Edge and Smooth Talk with Laura Dern. The movies that really spoke to me, in a sense, were these movies in which girls were going out and being part of things, but having to live with this enormous and pressing sense of danger, where, at any moment, they are about to be the injured girl. I’ve thought a lot about what kind of sexuality that engenders.

KY: Would you talk a little about how you’ve worked, in Jane in particular, to create complex portraits and how this complexity or open-endedness operates in such projects?

MN: Like Emerson says, “relation and connection are not somewhere and sometimes, but everywhere and always.” Still, you have to make sure that the rays of relation you’re drawing are the ones you want to draw. There’s a way of drawing rays of relation whereby things close each other down and there’s a way of creating that sense that things could always have been otherwise. The rays of relation can keep moving. Kind of like open-ended and closed-ended toys for children: One kind of toy can only be a GI Joe and the other can be a stick or a bunny or whatever. That’s the thing about poetry that can be so great–it’s typically focused on the employment of language in this more open-ended way.

When you’re working on something autobiographical, the book is often a portrait of things as you understand them at the moment of writing. If we only ever understood our stories the same way once then it would be boring. In Jane I didn’t want to write about my dad and him dying, but in The Red Parts it became a part of it. And yet, the way I understood the relationship while writing it then is not how I understand it now—and I didn’t even write the book that long ago. Or, at least now, it just seems like a dull paradigm—dull because I experienced it already, while writing. It’s not like you’re making meaning, but you’re bringing things to the fore as best you can and as clearly as you can for the timeframe of that particular writing project. If you fool yourself into thinking that you’ve found a meaning that will live outside of the book’s moment, then, to me, you’re getting away from the aesthetic conundrum presented by that particular book.

But it’s also hard to work on a book as a snapshot because you work on it over time and you’re changing while it’s changing. Things that were true suddenly seem flimsy. That’s why I like publishing books—because they go to print and then it can become a snapshot. Up until then it’s this great beautiful molten process.

I think you can get attuned to recognizing when you’re groping around for symbols and when you’re attending to things “as they were.” It may also depend on the kind of person you are. Some people want more meaning-making in life, in general. To me, too much meaning-making can resemble those OCD-moments when you’re leaving the house and thinking, “if I leave that napkin on the table I might get into a car accident.” When I was a kid I was really into those head trips. (A lot of kids are.) Now, when it comes to writing, I am really wary of them. But you also have to be intuitive. It’s a productive conundrum.

KY: Though the voice in The Red Parts is weaving together events in the world, it isn’t doing it in a way that is stifling.

MN: Take the blue book I just wrote: It moves along; it has a beginning and an end. But it’s kind of about juxtaposition, and juxtaposition is a whole of way of teaching how to see rays of relation.

I just wanted to say one more thing about the female gaze because what I said before was all so negative. In this blue book coming out, called Bluets, there’s a lot about looking at beautiful things—looking at color, but also about trying to find a more happily horny sense of looking. There’s a part in Bluets about Catherine Millet’s book, The Sexual Life of Catherine M.–which is about what she likes to look at during sex, what kind of cocks she likes to look at, etc. I think it’s one of the only books I know by a woman about her visual experience in that realm. Her book makes apparent how a lot of the perceived problems between the personal and political are kind of American problems. Catherine Millet’s gaze is philosophical as well personal. People think it’s not sexy because it has this abstract analysis of genitals. We still think sex isn’t intellectual. And yet sex is great and can be very primal, but it can also be a hell of a mind game.

KY: The summer issue of Chaparral centers around a noir theme—a very loose definition of noir, focused on the color black and the tone of some of the post-war noir texts and films. Did Jane or The Red Parts ever feel like they were crossing into the noir genre or redefining it in some way?

MN: Jane felt, to me, in conversation with noir and that’s why part of me wanted it to look like a small pocket dime-store sized book more specific to the era and the genre. But although it has that size, I picked a picture of my aunt for the cover that wasn’t this cute young girl. I mean, she was a cute young girl, but that particular photo sort of strips her of normative attributes, which I liked as well.

The Red Parts was more literally noir, as it had me hanging out with these detectives—it even had, at one point, a chapter called The Female Dick. I let The Red Parts be published in a certain way, but my hope is that, over time, it will fall out of having anything to do with murder and mystery. I imagine a dusty jacketless thing that somebody might pick up in a used bookstore somewhere and have a totally unexpected encounter with.