Well, growing up as a kid there were things I knew
and there were things I did not know.
When I heard Donald Trump say what he said about Mexicans two
years ago, I knew he was going to come for the Puerto Ricans
too.
And now he's come for the Puerto Ricans
as that island sinks beneath the waves.
One of the experiences I had that
informed me-- that gave me that knowledge from the basis
of the following poem.
This is the poem that was published
in Poetry of Resistance--
Voices for Social Justice, edited by Francisco and Odilia.
It appears in this book and I'm very proud to have it there.
So this is a true story.
And what began for me at the tender age of 23 as a lark,
as a goof turned into an act of civil disobedience
and eventually raised awareness.
This is called Isabel's Corrido.
And it's for Isabel.
Francisca said, "Marry my sister so she
can stay in the country."
I had nothing else to do.
I was 23 and always cold, skidding and cigarette-coupon
boots from lamppost to lamppost through January in Wisconsin.
Francisca and Isabel washed bed sheets at the hotel, sweating
in the humidity of the laundry room, conspiring in Spanish.
I met her the next day.
Isabel was 19, from a village with the elders spoke
the language of the Aztecs.
She would smile whenever the ice pellets of English
clattered around her head.
When the justice of the peace said, "You may kiss the bride,"
our lips brushed for the first and only time.
The borrowed ring was too small jammed into my knuckle.
There were snapshots of the wedding and champagne
in plastic cups.
Francisca said the snapshots will be proof for immigration.
We heard rumors of the interview.
They would ask me the color of her underwear.
They would ask her who rode on top.
We invented answers and rehearsed our lines.
We flipped through immigration forms
at the kitchen table the way other couples
shuffled cards for gin rummy.
After every hand, I'd deal again.
Isabel would say, Quiero ver las fotos.
She wanted to see the pictures of a wedding that
happened but did not happen.
Her face inexplicably happy, me hoisting a green bottle dizzy
after 1/2 a cup of champagne.
Francisca said she can sing corridos,
songs of love and revolution from the land of Zapata.
All night Isabel sang corridos in a bar room
where no one understood a word.
I was the bouncer and her husband,
so I hushed the squabbling drunks
who blinked like tortoises in the sun.
Her boyfriend and his beer cans never
understood why she married me.
Once he kicked the front door down
and the blast shook the house as if a hand grenade
detonated in the hallway.
When the cops arrived, I was the translator watching
the sergeant watching her, the inscrutable
squaw from every western he had ever seen--
bare feet and long black hair.
We lived behind a broken door.
We lived in a city hidden from the city.
When her headaches began, no one called a doctor.
When she disappeared for days, no one called the police.
When we rehearsed the questions for immigration,
Isabel would squint and smile--
Quiero ver las fotos, she would say.
The interview was canceled like a play
on opening night shut down when the actors are
too drunk to take the stage.
After she left, I found her crayon drawing of a bluebird
tacked to the bedroom wall.
I left too and did not think of Isabel
again until the night Francisca called to say your wife
is dead.
Something was growing in her brain.
I imagined my wife, who was not my wife, who never slept
beside me, sleeping in the ground,
wondered if my name was carved into the cross above her head,
no epitaph and no corrido, another ghost
in a riot of ghosts evaporating from the skin of dead Mexicans
who stagger for days without water through the desert.
30 years ago a girl from the land of Zapata
kissed me once on the lips and died with my name nailed
to hers like a broken door.
I kept a snapshot of the wedding.
Yesterday it washed ashore on my desk.
There was a conspiracy to commit a crime.
This is my confession.
I'd do it again.