44 Exiliados
To Abuelita Neli
This is my 14th time pressing roses in fake passports
for each year I haven’t climbed marañón trees. I’m sorry
I’ve lied about where I was born. Today, this country
chose its first black president. Maybe he changes things.
I’ve told Mom I don’t want to have to choose to get married.
You understand. Abuelita, I can’t go back and return.
There’s no path to papers. I’ve got nothing left but dreams
where I’m: the parakeet nest on the flor de fuego,
the paper boats we made when streets flooded,
or toys I buried by the foxtail ferns. ¿Do you know
the ferns I mean? The ones we planted the first birthday
without my parents. I’ll never be a citizen. I’ll never
scrub clothes with pumice stones over the big cement tub
under the almond trees. Last time you called, you said
my old friends think that now I’m from some town
between this bay and our estero. And that I’m a coconut:
brown on the outside, white inside. Abuelita, please
forgive me, but tell them they don’t know shit.
Saguaros
It was dusk for kilometers and bats in the lavender sky,
like spiders when a fly is caught, began to appear.
And there, not the promised land but barbwire and barbwire
with nothing growing under it. I tried to fly that dusk
after a bat said la sangre del saguaro nos seduce. Sometimes
I wake and my throat is dry, so I drive to botanical gardens
to search for red fruits at the top of saguaros, the ones
at dusk I threw rocks at for the sake of hunger.
But I never find them here. These bats speak English only.
Sometimes in my car, that viscous red syrup
clings to my throat and I have to pull over —
I also scraped needles first, then carved
those tall torsos for water, then spotlights drove me
and thirty others dashing into paloverdes;
green-striped trucks surrounded us and our empty bottles
rattled. When the trucks left, a cold cell swallowed us.
from The Book I Made with a Counselor My First Week of School
His grandma made the best pupusas, the counselor wrote next to
Stick-Figure Abuelita
(I’d colored her puffy hair black with a pen).
Earlier, Dad in his truck: “always look gringos in the eyes.”
Mom: “never tell them everything, but smile, always smile.”
A handful of times I’ve opened the book to see running past cacti
from helicopters, running inside detention cells.
Next to what might be yucca plants or a dried creek:
Javier saw a dead coyote animal, which stank and had flies over it.
I keep this book in an old shoebox underneath the bed. She asked in Spanish,
I just smiled, didn’t tell her, no animal, I knew that man.
Second Attempt Crossing
for Chino
In the middle of that desert that didn’t look like sand
and sand only,
in the middle of those acacias, whiptails, and coyotes, someone yelled
“¡La Migra!” and everyone ran.
In that dried creek where forty of us slept, we turned to each other,
and you flew from my side in the dirt.
Black-throated sparrows and dawn
hitting the tops of mesquites.
Against the herd of legs,
you sprinted back toward me,
I jumped on your shoulders,
and we ran from the white trucks, then their guns.
I said, “freeze Chino, ¡pará por favor!”
So I wouldn’t touch their legs that kicked you,
you pushed me under your chest,
and I’ve never thanked you.
Beautiful Chino —
the only name I know to call you by —
farewell your tattooed chest: the M,
the S, the 13. Farewell
the phone number you gave me
when you went east to Virginia,
and I went west to San Francisco.
You called twice a month,
then your cousin said the gang you ran from
in San Salvador
found you in Alexandria. Farewell
your brown arms that shielded me then,
that shield me now, from La Migra.
El Salvador
Salvador, if I return on a summer day, so humid my thumb
will clean your beard of salt, and if I touch your volcanic face,
kiss your pumice breath,