Thursday Apr 25

On Hiatus

Angel Garcia - Poetry

Angel Garcia has lived in several cities throughout Southern California. He has worked in the field of education for several years as a tutor, residential advisor, instructor, and most recently as a coordinator for an educational non-profit in El Monte, CA. Angel is currently completing his first collection of poetry and working on several nonfiction essays about Chicano masculinity.
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Night Sweats
 
 
There are serpents in my socks.  I put them on each morning and they slither between my toes.  I wonder what it might feel like to travel the world on my belly.  Some say all I am looking for is love: the perfectly cut out hearts of it, the delicate paper mache.  But often, I like the nitty gritty dirt clods thrown at me like when I was a child.
 
There are eggs in the refrigerator that have sat there, cold, for three months.  I haven’t thrown them away because I am afraid of letting go.  I am capable of forgetting who I am, who I think I am.  The philosophical popeye dilemma of existentialism.  I’m looking for spinach in my cupboard but have never owned a can opener.
 
Yesterday, I watched the world move so slowly, revolving.  Seen the same shadows crawl over cemeteries.  I am a man who craves sin.  But does not want a son.  I’d rather he not have my hands, or my heart, the dark places I have tried to shed light on.  I bully the little boy inside me.  Call him names like “dummy” and “stupid” because I don’t have the courage to curse in front of a child.  My lies get stuck in between my teeth.  You can smell the stench of my treachery.
 
I keep asking myself all the unimportant questions because I am afraid of the truth.  Ask me how I’m doing and I’ll tell you I am as fine as wine.  I am glass waiting to be fogged up by someone’s breath.  I want to curse the old woman crossing the street who paints her body in white each night so she might know what it feels like to sleep in heaven.  I am piss drunk, pissed off because I only wanted to bite off a bit of your ear so that I might taste your thoughts.
 
City tenement buildings fill with prayer, humming, meditation.  I blame the dogs and the postmen, who commiserate about my own destruction.  My name goes out for a walk when I make love.  It’s polite that way.  But it leaves me at home to do the dishes.  I break a plate and glass because I have given up the martial arts expert in me.  He’s retired and dead.  Buried beneath the dojo.
 
There are rats in the sewer of my soul only their ears are too small to hear me call out their names.  The sheets are still undone and my cheeks are still stubbled from yesterday’s 5 o’clock shadows.  I know I’ll never be a man if I can’t grow a beard.  My father is not dead.  He’s still a man.  But his father is dead.  I sit like a name tag on a large oak desk in a building that didn’t mind its own business.
 
Death sleeps beneath my bed.  He’s a pretty quiet guy so I don’t mind him, really.  Except at night he moans out the names of the recently deceased and I dream of people I’ve never met before.  I cry for them during ceremonies I attend in only my underwear.  The women I have loved are dead.  I cry louder than their mothers, who are dressed in black and wear bonnets.  They hate me because I am more dramatic.  I cry at night and wake up with my eyes closed shut.  I think I’m blind and keep my eyes shut for the rest of the day.
 
Yesterday feels like two days ago.  Now is not now.  I’ve been biting the end of my pencil for years.  The consummate thumb sucker.  It is moldy and wrinkled.  Smells of self.  Take it out only when I’m ready to hitchhike to the next town where memory does not live.  I’ve been soaked through, spin cycled, left out to dry and lost all my color.
 
I dream that all the faucets are leaky.  I crouch beneath them and cannot fix the overflow.  I dream that I have a small child.  She follows me to each sink, crying out how afraid she is of drowning.  Her own eyes flood with salt.  I dream of a young girl I loved in high school.  Only I didn’t love her.  Only told her so.  She was in my bedroom again and I made sure to close all the blinds before we made love, afraid to see shame tattooed on my skin.  Soon all the city will be drowned.  I sweat at night and wake up, washed up in the sand of my regret, in the middle of nowhere, untouched.
 
 
 
Coming Home
 
 
I am trying to remember the exact pitch of my mother’s young voice
as she cried out—chicles, chicles—earning pennies in the Plaza Municipal.
 
I am trying to remember the sheen of my father’s skin as he cut sugarcane,
the sweat of hours glowing on his body several shades darker than the soil itself.
 
So that now, I might take the box of gum from my mother’s hand
and reach out for my father’s wrist to take the machete from his.
 
So that I can lead them, across time, across land to the house
they will build, cinder block by block and let them walk across
 
the tile they will lay, square after square, and introduce the children
they will bare, boy after boy after boy after boy.  The only house
 
they can afford built on a dirt road three toll-booths south of Tijuana.
Or this: a simpler truth.  About how as a thirty-year old man I’ll return
 
home, though no one has called it that in years, to a house covered
in lightweight blankets of dust, where the termites have done the work
 
of forgetting and what remains clings to ceiling corners like spider webs.
Now, with a broom held firmly in my hand I try to sweep the last silence
 
from a house long abandoned, like a child waiting for his parents to return.
 
 
 
 
Falling Asleep
 
 
A lemon falls from a tree
—the first half of a heart beat.
 
Then the rattle of a neighbor’s AC.
 
A car chokes on the cold of early morning,
wiper blades cut through mist on glass.
 
The soft cries of my mother in the next room,
who hasn’t dreamt of her dead mother in months,
who hasn’t dreamt of her dead brother in years.
 
Nothing disappears, I’m convinced, but simply lingers.
 
The lamp turned off.  Eyes shut.  And still, hints of light.
 
All the world is asleep and I dream the flesh of ghosts:
 
—the tiny, womb-wet body of an unborn child asleep in my palm
—my grandmother’s thumb rubbing the sign of the cross along my forehead.
 
Finally, silence, though I have feared this all my life.
 
I tell myself, over and over again:
Open your eyes.  Open your eyes.
 
But I can’t stop the quiet.
 
 
 
 
Untitled
 
            after John Murillo after Larry Levis
 
 
Smoking beneath the frame of my front door
 
I notice the boneless corpses of snails, evacuees
 
of soil, seeking refuge from a night of endless rain
 
and I am reminded of an entire summer spent in a cemetery
 
in Progreso, Mexico searching for the grave of my great-grandfather,
 
his final poem supposedly etched into his tombstone.  Beneath
 
the shirt soaking heat of the Yucatan, my shadow laid down
 
in the shallow graves as I recanted the names of the dead
 
—Alvaro Yepes, Humberto Estrada, Armando Velasquez—
 
their bones resurrected after years of rain and erosion,
 
never my great-grandfather’s name, Narciso Palma, never his bones.
 
I’ve been told that he died alone, in a dilapidated shack,
 
his body wrapped in the cocoon of a hammock, the fluids
 
from his body, mostly cheap tequila, puddled beneath him.
 
I read the postcards he sent to my grandmother in search
 
of metaphor, and instead, within the beautifully intricate lines
 
of a cursive long extinct, discover the ghost of a man
 
who abandoned his children in search of words, on worn and yellowed cards,
 
kept in a shoebox beneath my grandmother’s bed, for more years
 
than I have been alive.  Sometimes, I feel, I may not be strong enough for poetry
 
and spend nights imitating the scrawl of my great-grandfather,
 
my hand trembling across the page, these hands, that sometimes are not my own.
 
 
 
 
Passing Pessoa
 
            “I never aspired to be more than a dreamer.”
                                                            Fernando Pessoa
 
 
There is a child lost in the neighborhood.
I cannot recall his face from the missing posters
and yet I look for him, walking block after block,
all the neighborhood dogs barking between the slats
of makeshift fences supposed to protect us from something.
I want to walk to the beach, but a family of hyenas hugs the coast.
I see their furry manes wild with sand and sea foam.
They look for small dogs to prey on.  Mine went missing last week.
I see bones still boiling in their stomach acids.  Undigestable fat.
I watch the horizon and see that a hurricane is coming.
Great tides rolling over the horizon.  I walk home slowly and fall asleep.
 
At night, a small child, with rotting flesh, perches on my chest.
As small as a bird fallen from the nest.  The child drools green
slobber on my face and I imagine what it feels like to drown in algae.
Someone pulls me from room to room by my ankles, a ghost.
 
She was in my bed again last night, in the kitchen too, the bathroom,
all at the same time.  When she made love to me the moon whispered
across her skin.  Her entire body was the purple of plum and bruise.
When she spoke every word she uttered started with the letter “p”.
I tried to understand, wanted and craved her words.  I tried to speak.
My mouth was sealed shut.  No lips.  No crease.  But mouth            less.
 
There are reindeer sleeping beside me and some nights I fall
into bodies just before they die.  I see what they see just before
everything goes dark.  At night the lights flicker on and off.
Eyes open.  Eyes closed.  They flicker on and off.  I’m an expert
of shadows.  Sometimes I am the cat outside my window
bitching about desire or something or other.  I want to scream.
But I am afraid I might wake the neighbors.  I can hear them snoring.
 
When I wake for breakfast                                         Half of his thigh
I sit down on a chair of bees.                                      already digesting.
I hit my head against the wall                                     I smoke a pipe
and yolk drips to the floor.                                         and watch the smoke
A spider crawls over my body                                    escape from
and it is my own hand                                                            the back of my head.
scratching an itch                                                        Blood oozes down the wall
from two years earlier.                                                in rivulets thick as syrup.
I eat my dried toast                                                     I cry into a cup
and hear a small child cry out.                                    and it tastes like the sea.