London

what you have is the forward march of time
these rains come and they pour
the three black-coated strangers with blue plastic bags
on a foggy street punctuated by cars going the wrong way
guffawing, barrel-chested, smokers in the winter

for those fleeting seconds you wish your souls could trade places
transiently escape things that drain you
but you are stuck with leaves in a gutter after a thunderstorm
browning, rotting, an unanticipated natural decay
in this place you thought had no seasons

the only respite from self-smothering angst is
one foot in front of the other
the forward march of time

Then and now (and then again)

Times change
like handwriting, painstakingly
formed straight lines deliberately dragged
perpendicular to two solid green lines
and one dotted,
metamorphoses into scribbles, illegible scrawls
on napkins and post-its and prescription pads,
cursive the nuns would have rapped your knuckles for
but now you lost the will
time, precious time, has robbed you of the discipline,
the neatness, the straight laces and the luxury to sign your whole name.
"What a shame,"
your father says, as even he
behind the fog of cataracts
perceives that something has been lost.

Times change
like love in its infancy, replete with letters and melodies
dripping with rainwater and snow and sleepless nights of poetry whispering itself into your idle ears
romances fade with distance and masochistic employment
until sweetness is gray and kisses
are neutral clouds that may rumble emptily and carry storms out west or simply
dissolve into bland blue skies
(until the seductive lock of hair caresses your temple
like fingertips whose ridges you never forgot
and you wonder
if your heart will ever be more
than a music box,
a curiosity in an antique shop
with a cracked lid
a scar from when containing yourself
contained you.)

oh unlucky thirteen

oh unlucky thirteen, they tell me the next one
will be better but I don't believe in stars anymore.
the rigmarole was finally too much for the spark of
hope to bear and like an anvil it squashed the whites
of my pupils. that bright light is buried, much as
the one who loved me, cradled me, birthed me by proxy
told me, warned me for the last two decades and now his
sorrow has strangled him into silence. below this
interminably gray sky and the incessant mist of a confused
foggy threshold between seasons I beg you to usher in
a different ode to the new year that the flame of my soul
might shine through, resurrect his beloved toddler and
wash away the disappointment we have etched into his face.

I accept peace

when the air starts to bite
your lungs like horseradish
your breath goes only so far before your chest
stops rising against imaginary hands

block's a ghost town and that
industrial wasteland by the post office tumbles even more weeds.
step by step, one sneakered foot
hopscotching its way in front of the other
--step on a crack and you'll break your mother's back--
until the chalk like fairy dust encounters a used condom
sandy, gritty, the residue of cement and a bright blue
wrapper a few fractures later.

the gray sky rumbles over the games we play
but our daring paws call heaven's bluff
and we pad up to those streets with the big
houses and trees and ivy snaking up bricks
curvy vines hissing like a snake's tongue
--look, but don't touch--
go home to your dead neighborhood
because here the anaconda strangles
the fat man who walks his tiny dog
the viper's venom intoxicates
the anorexic mermaid staring out the green glass window
wasting down to the floating ribs
of the turret of your childhood dreams

if you're here after dark they release the hounds
so your cobra traces its spiral
downwards into the woven basket towards
a quiet cul-de-sac
where quiet crimes
and broken windows
and boarded-up doors
and rotting porches
disintegrate in stilted
stifled time
companions to a sullied rubber who resists a million years
of the flautist's invocation
to biodegrade

Y ahora que...?

I've been working in Guatemala in various capacities on and off for the past 6 years--as a community-based health worker, a qualitative health researcher, a fledgling medical student, a language school director, and an ethnographer--the direct result of which is a very complicated relationship with "the field."

In anthropology, "the field" is the site where we conduct our research, and it's often far away from home. The unspoken rule of academics is that the farther you go from home to do your research, the more legitimate of an anthropologist you are--a philosophy that betrays the colonial origins of our discipline. So if you're from the US doing anthropological research in Melanesia, you're golden.

My field site is not that far away from home, but it feels a million miles away at times. And it's certainly exotic in many of the ways that tend to pull anthropologists in like magnets. There's a history of colonialism and genocide, and poverty and oppression are tangible in daily life. These themes, the bread and butter of much scholarship about Guatemala, are always ripe for political economic analysis. And furthermore, the majority of the population here is indigenous, which translates to opportunities for rich (and often overly dramatic) explorations of local symbolism and Maya cosmovision.

I didn't know I'd end up here. It happened by accident. I learned about Guatemala and the United Fruit Company and the US CIA-staged coup of the 1950's in high school, but never did I suspect then that I'd be spending a good chunk of my life working in the land of eternal spring. Through chance connections, I began to work with an NGO here and haven't stopped since. Guatemala is enchanting, and I mean that in the best and worst senses of the word.

Many of the formative moments of my twenties happened in Guatemala: sharing nauseating glasses of corn gruel with impoverished coffee pickers, feeling human spirits float out of dying bodies in sterile hospital wards, breathing in the grime of a dirty third world capital in a state of hyperaware insecurity. I'm not sure what there is left to experience or that I want to go on experiencing it at this liminal phase in my life, in which I lack the skills and power to remedy any of the injustices I've been silently bearing witness to on a daily basis.

Some anthropologists, after learning the ways of a new culture, mastering a local language (or not realizing what was lost in translation), and developing meaningful relationships in "the field," never go back. I vowed to never be one of them. More often, I'd like to hope, anthropologists find ways to stay engaged with their research site. They go back periodically to visit old friends, conduct service projects, or (very typically) unearth new research avenues that will position them well on the path of "publish or perish."

I have many friends here. I have many acquaintances. There are many people here that I care deeply about. But I also feel spent, exhausted, tired--gastada, agotada, cansada. My dissertation research (which has entailed many an interview with cancer patients and their family members) has been emotionally tiring. Within and outside of my research and medical work, portraits of suffering await me at every corner, at every turn, whether they are unleashed as an avalanche of pain in a medical history, or whether they are puzzle pieces of a troubling life history that are slowly handed to me by my closest friends. Surely, there is more than suffering in Guatemala. There is much more. But it is much of what I perceive on a daily basis, and it has hollowed me out.

I'm ready to go home. But the hard part of leaving the field is not knowing when I'm coming back or in what capacity.

I've done research here for some time now. It's important, I love it, and yet it's not enough. Now--as long as my PhD committee members agree that I've done my time--I'm not obligated to make another trip to Guatemala to continue interviewing people about cervical cancer. And I really don't want to; the sorrow from all those encounters has seeped into my bones and I'd like to recover and sponge it out.

Yet I still want to come back to Guatemala.

And do what?

I'm no longer in the mood to be an anthropologist in the field. I still haven't mastered being a conduit rather than a container, and all I can anticipate is more sad stories that I can't do much about.

But then am I supposed to be a physician in the field? My fieldwork has filled me with doubts about who should be providing health care to the rural poor, what high quality care entails, and what being a responsible practitioner of social justice medicine means in the short and long term. Does Guatemala really need another gringa physician traipsing between villages for a few weeks or months every year, counseling diabetics, deworming malnourished children, and providing prenatal care? The selfish part of me says yes, yes, let me do that! That naive part of me that strives to emulate a young Paul Farmer, hiking through the Haitian mountains with a backpack of medicine, is still alive. The part of me that has matured over the years says no, there must be a better solution than a single socially conscious foreign doctor providing care for the Guatemalan poor, even if she is working with local staff in long-term programs. Where is a single individual to direct her efforts to make the field a better place?

In the end, I have no answers, only doubts. I'm not sure what path the MD/PhD treads to get back to the field or what she does there. It is a lonely path and there are many forks, and it is a big field.

MD/PhD Epithets

I couldn't fall asleep last night so I ruminated over some post-colon and parenthetical phrases that could go after MD, PhD:

My experiment with mediocrity
Jack of all trades, master of none
When your best just isn't good enough

How you come to envy a cat

Each morning, I gaze at her cradling her head in the crooks of the couch, limbs splayed out in luxurious comfort. I watch her rub her neck against anything sturdy enough to take the abuse, and I admire how she scales the furniture and the walls to torture little moths and grasshoppers. She laps up water and crunches up her kitty chow, lovingly provided by these human hands each morning. Her life is so simple.

She’s my only friend. And I often wonder what it would be like to trade places with Poppy.

When I was studying for my first licensing exam during medical school, I remember a similar sort of feeling. It was an all-consuming process. My eyes were in a constant state of numbness, anesthetized by the glowing haze of endless multiple-choice questions on a computer screen. Periodically, I’d get paper cuts from leafing through First Aid, the medical student’s Bible of “high-yield” information likely to show up on the exam, and the fleeting pain would wake me from my studious stupor and remind me what it felt like to be alive again. Glancing outside the second-floor kitchen window, I’d see squirrels scurrying between the branches of a grand maple tree, their bushy tails tracing perfect little arcs, taunting me with their freedom.

How I envied those squirrels.

Whenever I found myself imagining the Freaky Friday version of me and nature’s tiny creatures, I’d decide it was time for a break. But guilt would overwhelm me as I’d lace up my running shoes to head outside into the summer heat. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to bring along my mp3 player and try to passively absorb the lectures of Dr. Goljan, a famous pathologist who had trained many a med student to pass the boards. As fate would have it, I only ended up retaining his lewd jokes. Ask me how to keep straight all the different hematological disorders whose abbreviations end with “L”—CML, AML, CLL, ALL, etc.—and no can do, but if you’d like me to provide a detailed rendition of the time Dr. Goljan ran a marathon and pooped on a sapling in someone’s front yard, that’s well within the realm of my capabilities. (I’m going to be a great doctor.)

Now, years later, I am holing myself up in a social science archive on a daily basis, sifting through volumes of the mundane and the captivating thoughts scholars have had over the last fifty years about health care reform in Guatemala. It’s a different kind of consumptive process. It’s the anticlimactic ending to a long stretch of travel here in the “land of eternal spring,” during which I’ve been collecting people’s stories and watching life and death unfold on a regular basis. How does it feel to be a poor indigenous woman dying of cancer? Where do you look for help when there is none? And what drives people to look for care when they are pretty sure that all of the grains of hope have fallen into the bottom half of the hourglass? These are the questions I sought to answer, and empathizing with the sick and the dying took its toll on me.

I retreated to the library.

My life here is relatively cushy. I’m in a tourist town where I don’t tower over the locals as I do in the countryside, but rather, my stature makes me all the more anonymous. I have potable water, a large bed, and nighttime silence. These things ought to help me recuperate from months of physical and emotional exhaustion from acting as a container, rather than a conduit, for the words of the suffering.

But there is something ultimately draining about the rigmarole of self-care and the yellowing pages of a repetitive history. My only task is to read books all day, to relate them to the answers I thought I found, yet this merely leads me down other lines of inquiry until there is an overwhelming amount of text and self-questioning. As I ravel and unravel my thoughts, I find myself craving home—the conveniences of the United States or the inconveniences of rural life, but not this.

This is certainly a different type of voluntary drowning from preparing for the boards, but it is a voluntary drowning, nonetheless.

Every morning, I wake up and pour boiling water on top of a half-cup of oatmeal. And I watch Poppy the cat, and I think to myself, wouldn’t it be nice to access her simplicity of being, and not thinking so much?

Memory Terrorism

The craving is about something deeper

like biting knuckles and intuiting shapes
with the sides of your fingers, not the tips,
admiring the black night sky and light pollution
that drives you to drive along the county roads
whipping the wind with your cheekbones
your ears howling with tinnitus and deviant thoughts
your face flushed with exhilaration and
your capillaries with chill
letting the momentum roll you to a stop

blood only bubbles that way once
the first time you fall in love with life
something in those cornfields glowed brightly
your eyes
and the silhouette of a broken tree before a full moon

and then it was dawn
the rosy dawn of an interminable day
your soul caves in the sunlight like a hibernating vampire
stifled under the weight of a coffin of realization
that he may never taste the night again

Overcast

The clouds have enveloped the sky and the car is gone
and dusk has laid its veil over the city since dawn
the bright colors of walls and bodies pop out against the air gray
from smoke and gray from infinitesimal droplets
that make your hair grow wild.

You dreamed about it last night, that thing you fear
the unfinished business you thought was finished for years
but the residue sat like moss on the pebbles at that place you feel
inside your head when you cross your eyes
and the smell of skin and yeast and the texture of pleasure, awareness
fermented for some time before the sixth chakra opened
and gave you a taste of what was brewing.

The cobblestones are slimy and putting one treacherous foot
in front of the other requires attention
and your focus is lost somewhere between regret and relief
nostalgia and abnegation
the past and a future potentially
void of desire.

Is writing like Bach?

Leave it to ferment for a few weeks
and your newfound abilities fill you with a surprise
that your music teacher told you would come?

Muse! Bow propitious while my pen relates...

It's been an entire month and not once have I had a flash of inspiration for a poem.

Have higher studies made me stupid? Or maybe it's being immersed in other languages--I can't recall witticisms or idioms from my own.

You hit that straight on the nail!

...Straight on the head? ...Head on the hammer? ...Hammer on the nail?

What?

I find myself grasping for English words, subjecting strangers to stilted conversations. I grow worse, by the day, at schmoozing--which I was never very good at to begin with.

I told my Dad the other day that I lost my Muse. She used to dance around my dreams and my wakefulness constantly and I couldn't make her go away. Now I struggle to unearth sparks of creativity. He tells me that happens to those who study medicine. Then how come I know so many eloquent medical students and doctors, and I seem to be the only one who can no longer dazzle my imaginary audiences with word play?

Muse, please come back. And then maybe something will have come of the month of June.

21 months and counting

What is it that stops a heart,
one that has already been slowed down?

What makes it yank on its own emergency brake
when it has already seen that pile of rubble
already driven around the junkyard in circles before
already pumped the hands that tried to salvage the scrap metal
that tried to recycle
that tried to digest
and abandoned the project when the scratches drew too much blood?

Sometimes the seat of emotion
has to take a seat
and it needs a cane to get back up.

the uncertain future

when will your culture become a blessing
instead of a curse--
perhaps on your deathbed as you mutter
an unintelligible soliloquy heard only by
the particles of dust lodging themselves in your nostrils and mouth
and maybe God?

when will you know that he is "the one"
even though you stopped believing in soul mates long ago
as your heart deadened to higher orders of magnitude of passion
you are only comfortable with double-digits
yet you still struggle
to understand why romance novels reduce you to tears?

when will the breaths you take in
fill you with peace and joy
and release the despair that has knotted your stomach
into doubt about the order of things
and the ways they will never be?

cracked shell

"disturbing news from a foreign source"
you are fated to receive.

You are addicted to this horoscope,
this evil fortune cookie, because you
cannot stand the anxiety of uncertainty

you read greedily, hopeful for something better
than yesterday

when you are so isolated behind the bars
of your brain
every source is foreign
and all news is disturbing

Parrot

This experiment with mediocrity
tolls like a mournful bell:
rhythmic clanging at unpredictable hours
sunset
sunrise

Her name was Melinda and I was fourteen and she asked me
"would you rather be subpar at everything
or excel with a demon perched on your shoulder who
reminded you constantly of your imperfections"

I smiled with sealed lips because of that
crooked tooth I hide
on stage, narrating with nonchalance

(Melinda went to California)

that teenager could not choose
and decades later did not have to because she had option one down pat
and the demon of option two arrived like an unexpected houseguest

#22: True Dat

I am God and
God is love.



--
prompt: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” –Hemingway. Write a short poem that is also “truest sentence that you know.”

#15: The Bop

The young pale-skinned red-headed English teacher
(the thin one other teachers complained about for breastfeeding
under a blanket at the faculty meeting,
the one who inferred my fourteen-year-old secrets from my writing portfolio and kept them quiet)
blows her nose, how she weeps as we
write for the fifty minutes until the bell jars us awake.
Every so often I look up to her silhouette at the black chalkboard,
did she know someone in New York in those clouds of smoke and
panic and terror and frenzy, coughing up their lungs until there were no alveoli left?

It takes years for the young to understand the pain of their elders

Time passed and the bleeding, the amputees, the horror
etched into their faces like rushing rivers that make a canyon
echo, oh, Boston, we flirted for a mere few days before your streets
charmed me, and I loved your chic quaintness even post-heartbreak,
and this stomach weathered enough since New York to sink
and burn and spill its acid from my eyes.

It takes years for the young to understand the pain of their elders

I remember her encouraging handwriting
the wide cursive letters, friendly but elegant,
the angled imperfection of the stem of the "d."
Twelve years have taught me the depths of her love for
strangers.

It takes years for the young to understand the pain of their elders



--
prompt: Rules, Schmules
"Experiment with a poetic form. Break all the rules! Not sure where to start? Check out this list of forms: http://bit.ly/3JIt9K"

This is not a poem

I find myself waking up everyday wondering why I am doing what I am doing with my life. The feeling began to gnaw at me a few months ago. Now it bites me at night and I wake up to find blood all over the sheets.

I used to enjoy cooking. I used to relish the creative process. These days, my ATP is scarce. I'm in Guatemala. I mostly eat out of a deli. I bring the plastic-wrapped food back to my room and gulp down whatever sandwich I've picked. And then I breathe a sigh of relief, because I have avoided social interaction with the friendly Canadians and Koreans who currently share the communal kitchen with me and the hostel owner.

They're sweet, but the itch of what I haven't resolved pulls me upstairs behind a closed door and into a faux-solitude. I half-heartedly and unsystematically respond to emails. I close facebook windows as quickly as I open them. And I procrastinate on filling in the outlines that stare at me from black and white word documents, because I am afraid of what I won't write: a masterpiece.

People told me over the years that most MD/PhD students go through mid-PhD blues. They say it has a lot to do with seeing your med school classmates graduate and leave you behind to your life of fairly unrewarding tedium--you're typically still at the stage where things are not working.

That's not what it is for me. The wiser ones have told me about another struggle: accepting that many of us will just be "good enough." We will not revolutionize our fields, but we will be good-enough researchers. We will not be mind-blowing clinicians, but we will be good-enough doctors. The recognition has been sinking into my bones slowly, but I'm still trying to fight it.

There are dying embers of hope that I try to stoke in the hearth of my heart: embrace imperfection, this uncomfortable feeling of straddling two horses, and maybe you will again be able to craft words as easily as you did when you were ten, and the poetry flowed through your veins.

The child, imagination wild, possibilities endless, barely lifts her quill from the parchment. The twenty-six-year-old is lost in an open space, full of potentials, but confined in her mind, too worried about the future to think freely and scribble and doodle and make a literary mess.

How I miss that freedom.

#10: I Remember

I remember the bright brown old oak table we used to have
I remember the night that it rained so hard that water leaked through the roof and we put buckets all over the house
but not soon enough to save the table
I remember how it bulged up at its seams when the water seeped in
and the water never seeped out

I remember how I used to love myself with abandon then
I remember the first day the Neutrogena commercials began to brainwash me
I remember wishing my hair were as straight and predictable as Jennifer Love Hewitt's

I remember the daily battles with mediocrity that started when my age creeped closer to 30 than to 20

I remember the seasons changing in the leaves of the maple tree in the front yard
which we eventually cut down with hollow hearts because its roots prevented the grass from growing
I remember how the grass never grew back



--
prompt: Don't Forget
Listen to an excerpt of Joe Brainerd’s “Remember” here: http://buff.ly/14GJb1c Write your own version.

#7: I Regret to Inform You

I regret to inform you
that these words that are bursting forth from my left
ventricle don't circulate in my blood in the pattern you were taught
in school but move through my sternum as a sound wave suppressed
that is channeled into my fingers.

I regret to inform you
that these thoughts are so dark
that those who love me are too scared to finish reading
and I am too scared to read these stanzas to the ones
whose blood my smile helps pump

(better that I howl absurd as Allen Ginsberg
than close my eyes to make the world drop dead
as Emily Dickinson)

I regret to inform you
that sometimes these poems are reminders of
the essence of life as death
and the enjambment can only make me hope that
after death
comes nothing.



--
prompt: 7. I Regret to Inform You
"Write an ode to one regret that you have."

#5: Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner Soup

Pink spice, orange sugar, yellow zing, white sulfur
water
pressure
lentils
and the love of a friendship that continues to grow
in new directions after many years
but at the base has always been
cumin.



--
prompt: Look What I Made
"Make something. Anything! Write a poem about your spontaneous making experience."

#4: No hay señal

This webpage is
NOT AVAILABLE!!!!!!11
google
chrome could not load
the webpage because
w
w
w
DOT
amazon
DOT
com
took-too-long-to-respond;
the website may be
down
or you may be
experiencing issues with your Internet connection.
Here are some suggestions:





--
prompt: Found Poetry
"Look to Craigslist, newspapers, Twitter, anywhere for unintentional poetry. Using the original text, punctuate and use line breaks to turn it into a poem."

#3: Brother

You left in the womb gifts of nonsense and nicknames
and at birth they were in my marrow.

That mixture of aching love, admiration, fear, and guilt
that arcs through our aortas for the ones who gave us life--
we share a secret knowledge of how to titrate
what makes that blood.

The loveless lives of sad struggle the astrologers predicted for
both of us
don't depress me
because we will walk along, cursed hand in cursed hand,
under inauspicious full moons and pernicious sun beams,
laughing until our lungs breathe their last.




--
prompt: "3. Just For You"
Write a poem to someone and share it with them.

#2: Acquaintances

There are many of them
who will gather dust
as tattered new years resolutions
as moth-eaten dresses in dim attics
as shattered glasses in a library
full of books
and a crumpled old man
thirsting for words
and eyes too weak to see them
finds no respite from
solitude or
irony.

--
prompt: "2. Ink Stains"
Write a poem on paper quickly without lifting your pen from the page. Post image if possible. No edits.

#1: Two Tin Roofs

21: Sweating foreheads, father's tears and baby's yellow skin in a corrugated oven

26: Gray clouds rattling holes in the concrete and the loose-lipped husband
fingers grazing the wife's wincing stomach and quickening pulse

Did your naïveté give you the gift of hope to save a life
and did five years of books jade your heart about losing one?




--
prompt: "1. Easy Does It"
Write a short poem (less than 5 lines). Be sure to include at least two strong images. Don’t over think it, just do it!

El segundo nivel

You can't hear them, but you know what they're talking about. Her ashen face pales in comparison to her bright blue top, her bright red capri pants. The colors contrast starkly with the gray walls, narrowing into an unfriendly pair of doors, behind which lurks the smell of boiled plantain skins and death. Your eyes are drawn to the drama unfolding before you, but each time Doña Griselda offers a gawking comment, you avert your gaze to the stairs, to the ceiling, and you confuse the dim fluorescent bulbs with skylights under rainclouds.

Shame works on the eyes, but not on the ears.

She's the wife. Her pain is the most palpable. The others are too calm to have tasted that kind of love for him. They are dressed as drably as their surroundings. When the waiting area isn't teeming with hundreds of bodies, sweating, breathing, waiting, you can hear every tear. And she stifles her sobs into quiet gasps. How well you know those sounds, and how hard it is to ignore them after hours.

"He's in a critical condition," Griselda states to you in broken Spanish. It's not her first language, but the apple and the piece of gum you gave her unwound her jack-in-the-box tongue. The wife and the family members raise their hands in prayer, and the hallway inadvertently frames their woes into your personal theater. The wife half-falls to the floor, kneeling with palms cupped to receive the divine. The other family members remain standing. One of them places his palm on her crown. Your own hands begin to burn. You re-cross your legs and shift your weight, and the chairs groan uncomfortably.

Griselda’s narration continues. She looks at you, unabashedly, the wrinkles in her aged face contorted in pity and morbid fascination that you are too proud to admit you share. “They charge a lot for the coffins here,” she drawls, characteristically emphasizing the word mucho with a squeak. You nod affirmatively, and notice, in your peripheral vision, her jaw moving to and fro, her tongue punting the wad of gum from cheek to cheek. Her gray-black hair is draped over her back in a stringy ponytail. It barely moves as she leans over to mutter something unintelligible to Doña Linda, who just joined the audience from the chemotherapy salon. You look over to Luis, who swipes away furiously at text messages and emails on a tiny gorilla glass screen.

All four of you, sitting like ducks in a row, chew silently as you watch the wife rise from the floor. The prayer ends and she gets a phone call. “These moments are impressions that never leave you,” Luis remarks. His technological nonchalance is a ruse; his irises radiate with intensity and calm, his most charming paradox. Thirty-two years have given him crows’ feet, but you admire their elegance as he turns back to his phone. The wife disappears behind the swinging doors labeled with hostile red capital letters, “Inpatients.”

Seconds later, you hear a scream. “Bobby!” The wife runs through the doors, frantically, begging for someone to call a doctor. She begins to wail, as there is no response. All of the floor nurses have gone home but one, who emerges from the chemotherapy salon and states that the doctor has been telephoned and all should remain calm. The wife bursts back through the doors again, and as they oscillate between open and closed, you see a few pairs of blue and white scrubs and Crocs shuffling half-heartedly towards Bobby’s bed. Griselda and Linda cluck in disapproval.

A cold air washes over the four of you and you hear the wife’s strangled cry. She emerges once again, covered in yellow protective gear and a blue mask, defeated. Her agony boomerangs from her mouth to your eardrums. Your hands continue to burn. As your sternum hollows, Teresa, the pruny and frail lady you’d have never guessed was 34, hobbles through the door of the chemotherapy salon towards the cushioned chairs.

“Let’s go,” Luis says. You give Teresa a piece of gum, she beams at you, and the five of you walk towards the stairs in silence.

Sacrifice and the sweet smell of mangoes

The thankless job is standing
hands clutching for support as you swerve
in and out of clouds of carbon monoxide.

Your stomach and your anxiety
become the unsolvable riddle
of the chicken and the egg.

You crane your neck
feeble attempts to see the outside world
the sweeping landscape of tall cypress trees.

When your words start rusting as the bars that jail them
your cheeks grow red as the iron oxide
and your misuse of prepositions
scares you into silence.

To be quiet is a skill
not forgotten, but unlearned.

Mountain Shrine

They took divergent paths.
He climbed to the top of a mountain,
sun-kissed skin, bronzed and dark,
and he perched on a rock
with his chin on his fist,
revelled in solitude and crisp air and pine trees,
a respite from the bitter aftertaste
of love lost.

She was never as nimble-footed as he
and boarded bus after bus
and swerved along curvy roads
sandwiched between the flesh and bones
of the world's unwanted,
as her heart flitted and fluttered
caught off guard in the thin mountain air.

There was never a pretense
that destiny had not chosen for her
a solitary path, littered with brambles
and punctuated with cruel appearances of lovers embraced
amidst the jagged cliffs and breathtaking skies.

Her strength was her weakness.
Achilles himself shot her heel,
and the tears formed a silent stream
that gave life to the trees
and breath to the birds
and love to the people in the valleys below.

Prayer for the unseen

Spritely, spunky,
the writer with fashionable glasses
(and more importantly, nonchalance)
sits down to sip tea
at a wooden desk
and lets her words flow.

You are no Samson
so you cut your hair
and hoped you could rouse the wilting Muse
by prickling her awake.

Hibernating, she fell from your freshly severed locks
onto your shoulder
and broke a few bones.
She raised her head slightly to whisper
incomprehensible instructions into your ear,
and her head lolled,
and her eyes drifted shut.

You cradled the Muse in one palm,
all the while watching the writer
peck away at her keyboard,
jealous that she has ten fingers at her disposal.

The glowing bride, decked in red, smiles brighter
than her pearls, reminding you
of all the things you will never be,
as you struggle one-handed to eke out
letter by letter
dipping the quill in the ink.

The fibers of the feather make you sneeze.
As your hands reach instinctively to cover your mouth,
you drop the Muse.

The writer has not stopped sipping her tea,
the bride has not stopped smiling,
and you realize you will never stop trying to start.

Neblina

The car was moving too fast
for that road to be the one you imagine.

Your feet have treaded a forty-five-minute square,
countless tessellations of concrete octagons
neighbors interlocking like two hands
outlined with black paint on a silver canvas.

Lost.

A trapezoid ousted your mind's square
and the gloomy clouds blush a deeper gray
as the sun abandons them for the day.
Too stubborn to turn back, you forge ahead
and the highway fills your chest with fumes.

Scarf over mouth
you squeeze past two police cars,
a man guiding his calf on a rope,
and your steps fall in tandem
with the black pairs of flats ahead,
giggling as the buses bathe you in their smog.

At home, the hands joke
that silhouettes, perhaps, were never meant to be.
The outlines may never be filled in,
pulled apart by the whims of life.
Your lips twitch
and the emotion dissipates like smoke on the road:
fleeting to the eye, but lingers for nose
and the fingers apologize.

The fields of Patastillal

When the weight of your body is more than you can bear
you remember every rock that made every bump on the road
and the faux-massage of a rickety ride over the wheels
manifests as new cricks and aches
and reminds you ungracefully of the aging
that awaits you.

Dehydrated, broken, you thumb through old photos
at the end of a long dusty day
that filled your lungs with carcinogens from concrete jungles
and wood smoke and pine needles and shade-grown coffee.

"The air is rich here en el campo," the driver said.
Your courteous inquiries unleashed the memories brimming
beneath his swollen paunch, that he doubtless had not
when they first got married.
Antonio tames the pain in his voice with a stoic delivery
of how she left
the other man
and the years that have passed since he held his children.
"You get tired in the city," he chews and spits his tobacco
into the green fields.

But he goes back every time.

The gleam in his eye
he claims is love for the country
you recognize better as a wilting melancholy.

Each photo of your past self clouds your convictions
that the fountain of youth is ever kind to women.
His nostalgia buries you like the avalanche
of stones that made the road uphill
what it is:
a back-breaking harbinger of the sweat on Antonio's brow
that will one day drip from your own.

The prophesy comes true

The dust tickles your nose and travels down your throat.
It coats your pant legs, diffuses through your shoes,
and only your toes are protected
by pink-rimmed socks you nearly neglected to pack.

The biggest challenge in life is to walk
through these piles of ash and cinders and
breathe deeply the pulverized horse dung
swallow the lump forming at the back of your tongue
and let those tiny particles settle wherever they may in your body,
much as your dreams and capacity to love
settle as grime and grit
covering the ground around your footprints
in a fine layer
of what could have been but never was achieved.

Home

Exposed
those frayed ends you hide
the red and black fibers woven together and folded under
unruly fibers prickle your skin all day
so accustomed to the chafing that you never stop smiling.

I found a strand and I pulled,
unraveled my way to a chatty father and the smog
you breathe in day in and day out,
the booming stereo vibrating in the concrete walls,
the curly lock of hair the devil can't straighten
snapping back into place from the puppy's paw,
the whirring of sewing pedals
stitching up hems that are tidier than yours.

How much you've knit, how much you've purled,
and how discretely your needles click and clack
from row to row.
No one ever sees you spin the wool
but these curious fingers
have stretched taut the yarn
that made you.

Las Cumbres and Armita

Shoulders hunched forward, stomach in your chest,
another day on the road.
Counting minutes, counting kilometers,
and counting on backseat laughter
to raise your drooping eyelids.
When their eyes succumb behind you
yours follow the curves of the road
the skyline, drifting from rectangular patches
of green slanted cabbages to bright blue expanses,
and precarious gray fences that tease you about the vales below.

The sun sets and you count once again:
cars lined up like ants, buses spewing black fumes,
the low-droning hum of traffic the bass
to the backseat's revived running commentary.

You come home to his face:
lips curl downwards from rustic pleasure to an anonymous frown
(you don't always say the right thing),
his eyes change from country to city.

Habiliments of the grave

Hollow hollow hollow heart,
Years ago I dared to read the cards.
They prophesied your hermitage,
the shining light on the dark path,
beams illuminating the crevices and places unseen
where humans step and stumble.

Hermit hermit hermit heart,
Know that they will never heed your words.
They wish to fall for themselves,
they cry to you as they slip and tumble,
and your predictions incite their anger
when they inevitably come true.

Hollow hermit, your lips are sealed.
Your first breath gave way to a strangled sob of solitude,
and the illusion that stays alive for most
died as your childhood faded into premature senility.

Hold the lantern, hold it high,
you are merely a lamppost to passersby.
And those days that you see their smiles,
their jolly cheeks and pink abandon,
the fire you thought long gone glows,
those embers of doubt
how they haunt your hollow heart
until all the footprints are covered in snow.
Not a voice, not a breath.
Alone with the ice and cold,
Your hearth back to its status quo.

Hollow hollow hermit,
How long will your heart beat?

Silent scream for a dollar

Sometimes you contain it
it reverberates through your bones and blood
blood brewing, boiling, bubbling,
bubbling over into conscious asphyxiation and a gasp--

gasp for air

air enters your lungs but the breath is shallow
(shallow drowning is the worst kind)

kind enough to smile at the crack of dawn
dawn on you yet that at dusk, you can't hide the fury in your face,
face the inane conversation at the dinner table,
table the issue of what's cracking you?

You sometimes can't contain it
it reverberates through your teeth
teeth grinding at the letters scrawled on the check
check your math but not your temper
temper your voice about a billing mistake
mistake the waitress's ambivalence for malice

malice escapes as the tone of your voice
voice your complaint bitterly and the battle is lost

lost twenty pesos for no fault of your own
own your frustration and let it spread,
spread through your blood and your bones.

Metamorphosis

Once she dreamed of Baucis and Philemon:
the intertwined branches of two lovers immortalized as
the oak and the linden, in vibrant embrace
shimmering golden leaves brimming with life in the wake of an angry destruction.

Time ticked and tocked its way through xylem and phloem
and her own roots grew deeper into the earth.
The hope turned to sadness to anger
and back to hope again
and then all emotions oozed out as sap.

Wind will rip her leaves away,
locusts will descend upon her trunk,
their dead shells will stain her bark,
even if she gives the gods the wine and the goose.

It's still possible to stand tall and weathered
with a heart that pumps from empty veins.