Family & Ancestors

When Father Decided He Did Not Love Her Anymore

Tonight I will remember the model
With the wide, sad mouth
Who used to pose for father
Because I love the dangers of memory,
The boarded window and door,
Rooms where one bare bulb
Makes shadows swell up the wall.
And yet I recall only vaguely
The way her hem rustled on the floor
Like sand against tin

Plume

Transfixed to the, by the, on the congruities, who is herself a vanishing point coming to closure — dusky flutter — trilling away like a watchdog on drugged sop, channeling her mother and grandmother who’ ve engraved on her locket phrases in script: “glide on a blade” and “rustling precedes the shuck.” This is not my teeming fate, my rind, my roiling ellipsis or valedictory spray of myrrh.

Killing Chickens

Never mind what you think.
The old man did not rush
Recklessly into the coop the last minute.
The chickens hardly stirred
For the easy way he sang to them.
Red sun is burning out
Past slag heaps of the mill. The old man
Touches the blade of his killing knife
With his fat thumb.
I’ m in the backyard on a quilt
Spread out under the heavy dark plums
He cooks for his whiskey.

My mother’s body

1.

The dark socket of the year
the pit, the cave where the sun lies down
and threatens never to rise,
when despair descends softly as the snow
covering all paths and choking roads:

then hawkfaced pain seized you
threw you so you fell with a sharp
cry, a knife tearing a bolt of silk.
My father heard the crash but paid
no mind, napping after lunch

The cup of Eliyahu

In life you had a temper.
Your sarcasm was a whetted knife.
Sometimes you shuddered with fear
but you made yourself act no matter
how few stood with you.
Open the door for Eliyahu
that he may come in.
Now you return to us
in rough times, out of smoke
and dust that swirls blinding us.
You come in vision, you come
in lightning on blackness.
Open the door for Eliyahu
that he may come in.
In every generation you return
speaking what few want to hear
words that burn us, that cut

On Munsungun

My father in the aluminum stern, cursing
another fouled blood-knot: all the shits

and fucks as integral to the art of fishing
as the bait-fish, little silver smelts

I sewed like a manual transmission,
the same inbred order and precision

needling the leader through the ass,
out the mouth, through the jaw, out the nostril

Anonymous Is Coyote Girl

From a newspaper photo and article about my godfather, James Moreno, East Los Angeles, 1950.

(Three police officers took a brutal beating in a wild free-for-all with a
family, including three young girls.
From left, James, 19, and Alex, 22, in jail after the fracas
on the porch of their home at 3307 Hunter.)

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