Bird Eating Bird Read online

  BAPTISM

  The taller men with baseball bats, a tree branch garbled with knots,

  log iron, and leftover pipe from the fence they put up last summer.

  The shorter men gripping buck knives for slashing at the pig’s neck.

  And ripened on a dry slop of peanuts, cornflakes, and newspaper

  shavings, moiled between the washer and dryer and shelves of dust-caked

  soda bottles, the pig that grew tall enough to sniff and lick the doorknob.

  So, from the other side, I watched it turn and, hearing it flicker at night,

  dreamt of succoring the pig’s escape. Then, they unleashed it. It

  drumming its blunt, fleshy hammers through the downstairs hallway,

  its high-pitched cough the air it dragged over vocal chord lathing.

  Then, they prodded it across the yard and cornered it under the porch.

  So with a ka-thunk the pig, then stilled in its tracks, had to watch

  as one of the men crept up and dragged a knife across its neck.

  They held the sullen body in their pink, craggy hands, standing up,

  in order to catch its blood in a bucket. Blood Mother cooked

  into a musty, black blood-food we smothered our rice in. After that,

  the men heaved the body on a picnic table wrapped in Glad bags

  and tape and rolled the carcass on its back and split the skin down

  the long belly, its guts oozing out—all beigy, peachy, and blue like

  clouds of chewed bubble-gum or the bulbs of a wilted, worn-in coin purse.

  Collapsed hoses, too soft and slick to pile up, spread across the lawn

  in pearly pools. Then, carefully, the men excised the gall bladder

  before it broke and spoiled the meat, gallbladder curled like a finger

  on a folding chair beside them while they emptied the carcass to the snout.

  On the grass, the heart and lungs lay, and the throat ridged and perfect

  as a staircase. And then, the new backbone a metal rod they pierced

  and guided through the carcass. Tackle they hoisted onto some posts,

  so—though I can’t remember exactly—they could turn the whole thing

  on a spit. How it hovered for hours over the orange coals that startled

  whenever the juices dripped, and the rangy smell of singed pork-meat

  and charcoal slinked into our sweat, and the pork skin transluted, cells

  shimmering amber and snapping easily to the touch, hot loosened fat

  down our fingers, until the meat fell apart without having to hack at it.

  The men, smoking packs of Kool cigarettes and piling up the empty

  Schlitz beer cans, hardly mentioning a thing about the child.

  ONE FOOT

  Listen and you’ll hear a knock.

  Watch the dust lift off the land.

  Pray I give up my cane and walk.

  Some wind will tear the ears off stalks

  Of corn; no sound eviscerates the strand.

  I listen close, but hear no knock.

  Each footstep, I mill bones to chalk.

  Then, sink in soot wherever I stand.

  I dream I give up my cane and walk.

  In nightmares, wispy pipe-roots block

  The blood flow to a leaf-foot, browning, orphaned

  On the stem. Listless, I hear the knock

  Of the oxygen machine. The good doc

  Strings me up a foot, leaves me bland,

  Yellow toes. “Go ahead and walk,”

  Doc says and hacks the cast to a caulk

  Of gauze, peat hair, and loose, tanned

  Skin Nurse swabs. Like clockwork knock

  Gulls at my windowsill. That bad flock,

  The smallest sores pique their demands.

  Listen. Do you hear them knock?

  Do I pray harder? Wake up. Walk.

  GROCERY SHOPPING WITH MY GIRLFRIEND WHO IS NOT ASIAN

  Through the doors gleam pyramids

  of apples, peaches, broccoli hybrids.

  I pronounce a name in Minh, kài lán,

  pull back its leaves, and reveal small,

  white flowers. All to watch her mouth

  the words and make white flowers

  translations. She asks what uppo is

  and I tell her how my auntie grew

  the woody fruit by foot-long beans,

  tomatoes my father claimed to grow

  on his own. If she needs more, I’ll list

  ingredients like a poem, like garlic

  onion, ground pork, and potatoes.

  Vegetables I don’t have words for

  stew for an hour in that poem.

  We don’t last long before the blitz

  of shiny packaging overwhelms her.

  One sea green cellophane submits

  to a lime, pea, then a teal wrapper,

  the lucky elephant or lotus stamp,

  the photographs of curious

  food items that luxuriate in broth,

  a cartoon sketch of a boy’s face

  above some steam lines and a bowl—

  delight the angle that his eyes slant

  as he devours the noodles. Brands

  we differentiate by script, each lilt

  depicts the path a language takes

  to conquer, infiltrate, or drift.

  Some brushstrokes end in a tip

  sharp as my tongue when I dish out

  old-fashioned, Asian lady barking.

  The aisles feed into a basin where

  aquariums line the walls, and fish

  glint beneath fluorescent light bulbs.

  When I say, So gorgeous, I feel guilty

  eating them, that’s not the half of it.

  Next week, we trade-in excess beauty

  to shop at the markets my Mother

  took me—and I still shop as though

  my girlfriend and I had never met,

  where we fish beans from boxes;

  dodge old ladies throwing elbows

  at the fruit bins; scales unraveling

  off a fish when a butcher knocks

  the daylights out of it. And in time

  come the meals we dine on chicken

  that stinks of piss-soaked feathers.

  LANGUAGE POETRY / GRANDMA’S ENGLISH

  Dos / doze / those / toes shuffles through my head

  when Grandma speaks, consonants blurred

  from her mouth a flat tire. Unable to make out

  each word I try reading lips, What / that / cat woman,

  but end up lost. Her lips relaxed, bursts of sound

  fretting through them. You muddy her, Grandma barks

  at my father. You muddy her, she drives you grazy.

  A child, I love their arguments, never fully

  understanding what Grandma means when

  she tells Dad, She get you rosin / rousing / rosing.

  You watch. She geep driving you grazy. Though

  I do get when Grandma says, / gahng /, for can,

  and when she says, / gahng /, for can’t.

  When she curses, wants sympathy—like,

  / Gahng / it raw meat. It gives you gancer.

  Look it’s / rrrud /, she blusters. Her r

  like she’s starting a lawn mower. / Rrraw / meat,

  Charlie, she argues, shows it to my father.

  Marinade, he answers. And Grandma gives up.

  A martyr she says, Go on, it it. Her tongue

  forcing sparks from our household English.

  Beauty when she grabs her chest and sighs,

  I gahng go up dos stairs, Charlie. My art, my art!

  O the Eyes that will see me,

  And the Mouth that will kiss me.

  And the Rose I will stand on,

  And the Hand that will turn me.

  —José García Villa

  TRES MUJERES

  1.

  She watches from the chair.<
br />
  Two lovers unlock the hatches

  of each other’s shirts. Crowbarring

  of their wasp-sprung mouths where lips

  eave together. Their bras barbed

  to the bed. When their arms sigh

  into place the fireplace toolery.

  In an hour or so the phone rings.

  The receiver from her paw—knuckles

  fast and cum-crusted—to the spotty

  drop cloth. In her ear the rumpus

  it’s 10:00 it’s 10:00

  2.*

  across the bed h h h

  h all the air at her back

  h breath on her neck and neck on her lips

  h quickened over a scissor leg

  when h threads her arm across the other lovers

  she scores homophones

  there their they’re

  3. (Scratched Sapphics)

  My magandang naman.* Don’t have any

  words for making this better. Sadness,

  perfect leavening, tugs the heart’s ill-fitting

  What capacity feels like: emptiness and

  ache. A backwardly line, the needle luring

  thread though the holes that’ve been pierced already. Stars, so

  gravity-cooked, they

  bead to cushioning blackness. Tell as much as

  need be: Nothing can worsen how she feels now.

  Tell yourself, about anything you need to.

  Heart, rest a little.

  LAS MENINAS / THE MAIDS OF HONOR

  —Museo del Prado, España

  Thirteen, I stumble

  into the princess’ gaze.

  She’s composed, defiant.

  Morning slants through

  the workshop window

  and charges the threads

  of her blonde hair.

  The Infanta Margarita

  wearing a corset so tight

  light spikes from it, like

  a chest plate worn by

  conquistadors in paintings

  of Cortés announcing

  himself to the Aztecs.

  From one maid’s tray

  la infanta grabs a piece

  of amber-colored fruit

  that glows warm as a heart,

  while the maids search

  the porcelain of her face.

  Dwarves Maribarbola

  and Nicolasito, and a dog,

  accompany her, serving

  as amusement while

  she poses.

  Another maid teeters

  behind the Infanta, unrumpling

  the lace of the princess’ sleeve

  that goes astray each time

  her arm grazes the boughs

  of her skirt, boughs wired to

  spread the fabric at her waist

  and send it tumbling, a tissuey,

  stuffed tun to the floor.

  The Infanta shows

  no regard for Velázquez

  who also gazes from inside

  the painting, onto the world

  that lay beyond the borders

  of the painting’s framework.

  Somehow, Velázquez has

  captured that world, too.

  The King and Queen of Spain

  pose, there. Mere reflections,

  they appear as brief, bluish

  swaths of paint, in a mirror

  that hangs in the background

  on a dark rear wall.

  All of us onlookers

  in the museum’s corridor,

  standing beside the King and Queen,

  a troupe of royal attendees

  blued into existence by Velázquez,

  who’s turned his giant canvas

  to obscure our view on

  the action of his brush.

  How he heaves ochre-sopped

  bristles across the oily likenesses,

  giving the royals’ yards of skin

  a taintedness—the illusion that,

  with every breath, they ingest

  the same bleak air we do,

  the room tinged with flecks

  of green and purple debris.

  I gaze and the Princess

  gazes back through me.

  She’s luminous, a godly idea

  etched into human form.

  The rest of us abide with her

  perfection, infallibility. So much

  like the maids who ratchet up

  their heavy velvet dresses

  that razor dust off the floor.

  Those dresses they must harness,

  to concoct each step anew

  as they try to walk.

  BECOMING

  The form letter reads: If you dream

  of being Miss USA, this is your chance

  to turn that dream into reality!

  In disbelief, I turn the envelope over.

  State Pageant Office. Naca—that’s me.

  Mail in bio and recent photograph.

  Always Miss Nothing in photographs,

  I had the desire to fulfill Mom’s dream,

  Filipina beauty queen, but a fat chance.

  By ten, I was shouldering the reality

  of a size eighteen blazer. Not over

  weight, just big, a saleslady braced me,

  sensing Mom was about to scold me

  from the Casual Corner. That photograph,

  lost to the panels of a drawer, I dream

  out of me. But this letter reads chance—

  a word more potent than reality.

  At least to a poet mulling over

  chance into change, small changings over,

  how day-to-day I chance to change me

  more permanently. The old photograph,

  that suited me, I alter in my dreams.

  Thinking it, I set my heart to chance.

  Writing it, reality.

  So, why not this other reality?—

  where my real, my realm is turned over,

  exposing some dolled-up, plastic me,

  the makings of a bad photograph;

  nightmares scare up new dreams to dream.

  Why deny myself the chance,

  when life’s so chancy, chancy

  and (perhaps) even destined? Reality

  is just most people can’t get over

  beauty, can’t get by or past it. Not me,

  my poems, at least, aren’t photographic,

  symbols perfectly minted from dreams.

  They’re just a way to outlast reality,

  to take my chances and live life over,

  and be me, beyond a photograph.

  FALLING, CALLE ORIZABA

  —Mexico City

  1.

  Before I look, I test aceras with a rubber foot.

  sidewalks

  A glass leg extends from the street and comes to a hook my hand handles.

  Me: a doorstop guffaws over planks of hardwood.

  Each step, the arms of a clock tilt closer and closer towards noon.

  2.

  Once I shook my foot loose from a hueco in the asfalto.

  pothole

  Once I shook my foot and it twinkled like a burned-out fuse.

  Once I shook my breath loose inside my lungs and heard the ball-bearing’s timbal.

  Once I shook on a curb, in darkness.

  3.

  Then the filaments of the woozy harp tolled the doorbell.

  Then, she held the stringy cheeks of my purpling palms.

  I dialed up my feelings: my fingers wound numbers around the rotary phone’s spindle.

  Okay. This is me now: her hip bumps the table and the red in the wineglass bumbles.

  In the bath, my belly button breathes when it comes to the surface.

  A knock in the soapy water is just a heartbeat calling.

  WHAT I DON’T TELL MY CHILDREN ABOUT THE PHILIPPINES

  —Lingayen Beach, 1977

  I don’t tell lies. Memory’s more

  beautiful th
an truth. So I say,

  the air was blossoming jasmine trees

  and smoke. And it’s true.

  Clothes boiled in tin tubs. A child,

  I watched my uncle splinter

  arms of bamboo, his dark skin a blur

  in steamy drizzle. A woman

  with the burning end of a cigarette

  turned inside her lips. Her smile,

  a mouth of pink gums squeezed

  together. Mornings, my brother and I

  raced down the soft belly of the beach,

  climbed palm trees—grasping circular rungs

  like a throat—to see coconuts churning

  in the surf; the skeleton of a torn-down

  fighter plane, its snapped propellers,

  dented cockpit; fire holes on the beach

  where my family came down at night

  Dad drank San Miguels and never quit

  talking. Filipinos laughed at him.

  Mom sat, embarrassed, in the sand.

  My cousins, brother, and I stripped cane.

  The story ends there for children,

  but you wait in bed to hear the rest—

  how the air was steam, mosquito incense.

  Auntie Marietta set the table. Lanterns

  turned her skin red/blue.

  I sat in the clubhouse watching

  old men play pool till one said

  I look old enough to kiss.

  GLOVE

  [She] knocks, saying ‘Open for me, my [sister], my love, my dove, my perfect one’…My love thrust [her] hand through the opening, and my feelings were stirred for [her].

  —Song of Solomon 5: 2–4, from Christiansex.com/fist

  She pinches at

  the rough seams

  where the glove