The other devotional object figure
comes up in the next poem.
San Martín was an Afro-Peruvian ex-slave who became a Saint
in the Catholic church, kind of like Saint Francis,
with animals finding comfort.
And my mother used to keep a little figurine of his
on the dresser.
"So to my empowered friends, I love your story.
Like the shapes we made and the things we said
were demanding of us, now you ask me
why the sky is a tank full of lemonade out back.
All wet tonight, and bugs call up a swamp
in this desert in my story.
My dad wrote all the wrong names for her
on a brick that could lift.
Through my mother's window came the words arrayed in glass.
Dusting San Martincito on her dresser, cast in plastic,
with spaces in his robes.
A home for the hen.
The dog made mild in the skirts of the mongrel Saint.
Still lining a thin, easy silence,
around me come the scenes all down our street.
In someone's car music, each word lifted into its own space.
Thumps in the moon's heavy sleep breath, there are extensions.
We can read what we said.
It's such a simple print shop.
So mothers might tell us about what came to be more known.
A pear tree in the commons.
And really, the words left idle beside.
If they could tell us about the forms,
if these came to lift them, if we could ask,
sin miedo y sin piedad, wouldn't they, the mothers, never
say there was a time?
What hovers turns behind maybe two feet up.
From our scapula, a moon's heavy heel in the water.
An Aleppo daughter in my line ordered from a bride book,
bringing the wrong language to the Andes.
Her new stepkids taking her first stillborn
by the heel, far from her Arabic.
Taunting.
I've seen their pictures.
They were beautiful young people.
And those minutes that they feel in their mouths,
there are spaces for the refusals.
But we've heard migrants carried cultures in their dough.
Little strains of living stretching back
to out-leap our generations with their own.
Collapsing days into what they've written for us.
Socializing the mother function.
A daughter in your mother's line grew
to offer her English-less milk to strange babies in a Newark
tenement.
And once, in a parking lot around an igneous intrusion
called Enchanted Rock, we saw a daughter searching the asphalt.
And her father screaming, 'If you lost it,
I will destroy you.'
Not unhinged, but large, stretching the wet outlines
of his organs to chamber the particular grain
of his voices promise.
And here goes my voice trying to fit opposite promises
in relation.
For you would there be no address."