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At 13, your father climbed
the steps to your room,

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and his fingers stroked
between your thighs

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and warmed your blood.

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Outside, the leaf skinned snake
slithered in a royal silt grain

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to warm itself in the
stored sun's heat.

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For two years, your father
drew his dull life like a knife

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from a sheath and found
happiness in the wound,

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and you vowed never
to be vulnerable again

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after you left home.

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And in the painful afterglow
of sex after he left your room,

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you stayed awake
learning cunning

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from coyotes that prowled
scrap wood corrals, learning

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endurance from the
windmills grunting pipes

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and creaking fan blades, and
you dreamed in the darkness

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the night train that snaked
across the prairie pulled you

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onto its rattling boxcars
toward California.

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And while he read scripture one
evening from his black Bible,

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you told him you were
carrying a back seat baby.

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And his calloused hands
gripped the armrest.

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His haggard face
whitened, and his silence

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carved stone doors in the air.

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You walked through slowly
closing the doors on him.

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Cruising out of Willard with
Danny in a brand new Black

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Ford, your heart
gave its first wing

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spread and sword in your body
that now felt like a nest,

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and you thought of me planted
in the soft pearl of your body.

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And knew I would
become field prey.

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A few days after I was
born you filed for divorce,

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left me at grandma's door,
and ran away to California

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with your lover.

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This act of abandonment
was God's will and left

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no scent, no view, no
mark others might find.

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My image of you
fell in to my life.

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It fell across my life like
a massive branch sparkling

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with snow frost that filled the
air with the space of lights

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glowing in the
darkness each night,

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and I was never told
where you were at and not

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until your return years
later when I was a man

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did the snow crust melt on
that branch and your hands

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drift up like yellow flowers
I plucked and touched.

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And your face flowed
by like a mask I wore.

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Time had spun a white veil
around the dream you were,

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and now your words were moths
eating through the white veil

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as you told me of the
frayed skirt life father

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had given you.

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Each day of your absence had
become aged stone between us,

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mother, unbudgeted for
decades, and now in the ruins

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the chills, scream
of a baby abandoned

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came to us from a
distant adobe shack

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and drowned our voices out.

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And we never spoke to each
other again until several years

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after our meeting, a telephone
call came around midnight.

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Your mother's been shot,
and she was not going

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to make it through the night.

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Swollen mass of bruised flesh
mangled and human thing,

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tubed and monitored on
the bed, wrapped in gauze

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and soaked in blood.

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Unplug the machine
I told the doctor.

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Unplug it.

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Polishing her nails
in the kitchen,

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her husband fired four shots
into her beautiful face

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because he felt she
was going to leave him

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because she would no longer
live in his make believe world.

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And each bullet opened
another door of her life

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to interminable darkness she
walked in over meat scraps

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and bone fragments
deep into her own being

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that one moment of
life still left deeper

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until the bullets sounded
like a boutique shop doorbell

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hurling her past shelves
of rocks like scrub brush

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farmland she grew
up on in the llano

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into the warm arms of
grandmother, a woman walking

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her by the fireplace
where she closed her eyes

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and finally slept in peace.

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I found her diary on
her dresser and read it.

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I want to die.

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I have no one in this world.

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I want to die written
hundreds of times.

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Her daughter, my stepsister,
rushed in, ripped the diary

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from my hands and burned
it in the fireplace,

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but I had already read how
the family had lived months

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without talking to each
other, how mother had spiraled

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into love affairs with
younger men her daughter had

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been in love with.

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How mother wanted to
destroy a marriage

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and find someone who could
give her one kind word, one

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small gift of concern,
one small appreciation,

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and on the refrigerator written
in lipstick he had scrawled,

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you will never leave me.

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You will never go
out on me again,

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and then he took his own life.

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A long time ago, he
thought he had saved you

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from your own Chicano culture,
your own Chicano language,

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and drove you from the
dust and the tumbleweeds

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of Santa Fe across the
llano to the grassy valleys

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of California.

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And he placed your photograph
on his fireplace mantle,

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a trophy of a young woman
saved from her own people,

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and he thought of life as a
Wild West film and himself

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a quiet, resourceful cowboy.

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And when you pull the
plug on the TV, when

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you seized your destiny again
and shattered his trophy,

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lonely and desolate night
poured through the windows

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of your house the
misery of dim street

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lamps in the neighborhood,
lit your faces.

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And you realize both standing
there that you are old.

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You both had been
living a false dream,

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and your throats
coughed with sickness.

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And your voice is
strained with a tragedy

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that you had lived
nothing but a fairy tale

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then he shot you himself.

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