New Poem: The Boys of Juarez, Posting for DVerse Open Link Night and Beyond

The Boys of Juarez

“Or maybe we retell it

So the ashes are still riding around

In that stolen car, coaching life’s desperados;

In any case, the top is down, under

A cargo of stars.’

 “Black Beauty”, Dear Ghosts, Tess Gallagher

Yes some of us do have stories

of our desperado years,

the eating of ripe fruit after curfew,

or the winter we carried someone’s ashes

around in the car,

or collided with desperados themselves,

like the kids from Mexico,

who one summer day,

ate plums on the roof

of the trailer next door--

I had picked cactus spines

from their feet,

and wrapped one in my old comforter

while he shook with a fever

that passed—his lips

so parched and pierced

from sucking fetid juice

from the saguaro, and his sisters

back in Juarez waiting.

Miguel.  Miguelito,

my one, as if back in my love’s arms

in Minnesota, out in the barn,

in the fragrant loose hay,

lifting my hips in rapture

I had conceived a son,

born him in a dream, he had grown

from my arms to take wing

and now come back like his father’s

double, young chulo with olive skin,

dark eyes, a thick crown of black hair,

eating the dark rich plums, spitting their pits

down to the summer grass.

The seeds lodged themselves there

so that one day when a tree brings on

its green and arrowed leaves

and the blizzard of white blossoms

it sheds before the waking of the fruit,

the boys of Juarez will be remembered

for their planting by the half-charred 
moon's light,

that phased and holy

lamp that lights the misbegotten’s way.

They don’t clear their plates

much less rinse them--

they leave the pork chop bones

for the flies that come and settle

thick as unhulled sunflower seeds

on the table of the unrepentant,

and those that live

by  scavenging

for carrion.

And in the tarry air of day’s sweltering,

we pop Coronas and they sing

O Corazon que te vas,

and then the older one Roberto

has sudden tears, tiny diamond rivulets

through the near-soot of desert dust

streaking his face,

making a coal miner’s mask

around his eyes.

They had bathed in the river

and didn’t care if they were clean

or not; jacketed in sweat,

I make chile and carry it to them,

and they sop it up with tortillas.

The candle burns down and now we

celebrate their first days in America

drunk, raunchy jokes about sex

por toda la noche, all night;

I see the wild horses in their eyes,

hunger that flares

when someone is well fed

and I pull back,

before the Carmen in me

gives herself to them,

the harlot in me lifting her red skirt

away from her thighs,

and think then of the INS waiting in the dark,

the unmarked vans and the turncoat Latino cops,

their careful necklines where the razors

have come and gone, the clipped mustaches,

the sunglasses poised on the aquiline nose,

and the aguilar eyes, eyes of the eagle,

scanning the dusk for those

who look like themselves,

so dark and strong and young and full of hope

marching on toward the river, to sleep there

in the arms of its green breathlessness,

and on the latitude

of what they imagine

as a true and ripened

freedom,

as if they are safe.

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2012

*Aye, Corazon, que te vas—

Oh heart, why are you leaving…