Maurice Kilwein Guevara

B D T

Bright Pittsburgh Morning

This must happen just after I die: At sunrise
I bend over my grandparents' empty house in Hazelwood
and pull it out of the soft cindered earth by the Mon River.
Copper tubing and electric lines hang down like hairs.
The house is the size of a matchbox. I sprinkle bits
of broken pallets, seeded grass, fingernails, and tamarack
needles in the open door of the porch. I scratch a Blue Tip
and blow vowels of fire through the living room,
the tunneled hallway. Flames run up the wooden stairs.
I put my ear beside the hot kitchen window

Doña Josefina Counsels Doña Concepción Before Entering Sears

Conchita debemos to speak totalmente in English
cuando we go into Sears okayPor qué
Porque didn’ t you hear lo que pasóIt say
on the eleven o’ clock news anoche que two robbers
was caught in Sears and now this is the part
I’ m not completely segura que I got everything
porque channel 2 tiene tú sabes that big fat guy
that’ s hard to understand porque his nose sit on his lip
like a elefante pues the point es que the robbers the police say

Teusaquillo, 1989

Flowering sietecueros trees:
How easily we married ourselves
to the idea of that bruised light
outside the window,
capillary
fibers of the linen,
stained wood of the door frame.
Deepening hallway.
Beyond
the stucco portal,
crushed purple.

At night, tinnitus
we thought,
the ringing after an explosion,
a frenzied inner ear axle squeal,
until I placed my stethoscope's bell
on the purpled ceiling: