Excerpt from Always Danger

 

The Taxicab Incident

A boy runs into a busy street,
a boy who happens to be my father.
Yes he’s careless and yes here comes
the taxicab. This happened
in Bogotá, Colombia. And this:

a boy falls, a boy who happens
to be my father, fallen before
the taxicab. You know what
happens next: my existence
spoils the drama. How the taxicab

glides over my father and skims
his shoulder blades. He stands
unscathed and brushes the dust off
his clothes and continues to breathe.
Fallen differently, I’m not here.

Fallen the way he did, I am.
When the boy who happens to be
my father runs into a busy street,
I’m in the backseat of that taxicab
with my brother and sister.

The three of us, we’re outlined.
Our skin is translucent as cellophane.
When we begin to scream
nothing but nothing leaps
from the zeros of our mouths.

Such is how the future lives
without influencing the world.
And my mother? She’s the girl
hundreds of miles south, blowing
air into a plastic ring skinned

with water and soap. The flimsy
bubbles lift. Whether they are
pushed into a wall, the spikes
of branches, or the sky’s blue field,
it is up to the wind.

 

The Goldfish

He asked to be resurrected as a dolphin
but dolphins were running low on earth
so hours after his final breath shuttled out

from his lungs they wrapped his spirit up
in orange scales instead and transported him
to a pet store aquarium. It’s comical

and it’s not, considering the lesions
that governed his flesh when he was human,
the static of his wheezing, how his partner

held him long after he turned into a husk.
Then the conversion to goldfish, not the sleek
blue-gray body he always wanted,

one that would allow him to stitch—over
and under and over—the ocean’s sequin dress.
Disappointed, but not unlucky

since a loveable boy carried that goldfish
from the store in a clear baggy, knotted
and bulged with water. Carried it home

where the tank waited, an Emperor’s pagoda
like a wedding cake rising out of green gravel.
Thirty-six gallons of tranquility.

The dependable snowdrift of food.
And no suffering—the world’s shark,
gouging anything that moves beyond the glass.

 

Bully

As a toddler he turned thirty-seven
ants into thirty-seven asterisks
by pinching. During his teens
he pummeled the school mascot
and had the linebackers fleeing
whenever his shadow gouged
the earth. He did other things
to the mascot I won’t mention
but will point out the linebackers
flinched at the sound of a sharpener
chewing a pencil into a stake.
On his fortieth birthday he picked
a fight with a mountain and laid
the mountain flat. Don’t ask me
how he did this or how he took fists
to the ocean and bruised its waves
or the night he stopped the slow orbit
of the moon with a headlock—
cruelty has nothing to do with logic.
He should’ve died sooner but
shoved Death so hard to the floor
Death spent an afternoon snapping
his bones back in place. Dying
was to be on his terms and when
he finally perished he pushed
his way into heaven and called God
Sissy and Chump and newer insults
like Helium Head and Asparagus Dick
until He handed over the keys
to the universe. At last on a night
the stars quivered he had the sacred
quill and inkwell to scratch down
the new rules for living on this planet
which to no one’s amazement
we are obeying faithfully.

 

Driving Toward the Sun

Soon enough, after this slow bend
under the overpass, we will know
the story of this gridlock,
why the red eyes of brake lights
are opening their lids. We ease
around the turn and see the medallion
of the sun, a bonfire in the sky.
Every windshield blinded by gold,
but this is Southern California—
we fish out sunglasses from glove
compartments, purses, shirt pockets.
By the roadside, two cars
shattered by velocity and glare.
Traffic unloosens as the rest of us
accelerate, every car towing
its own rectangular shadow,
the deepest lavender, the hole
of an open grave at dawn—Damn,
it’s barely seven A.M. and already
I’m confronted with death.
I dwell on my mortality, theirs,
then mine again. The pros and cons
of coffin and urn. One’s too
claustrophobic. The other
you’re cooked and cooked
until you’re seven pounds of ash.
No wonder some of us believe
in the afterlife, the spirit flitting
in the body, the spirit shuttling off
to heaven after it’s unzippered
from the body. Up ahead
our closest star blazes. Bumper
to bumper we make a beeline
toward its light, honeying our skin.
Our sun-warmed and borrowed skin.