Three Poems

Exit Pupil
                                                                                                                             for Javi
An aunt solicits my opinion on the height
of your old canvas. I don’t know what constitutes
a portrait. I’ll call any man my uncle if he’s

nice enough. I’ll never have another uncle again.

In that house where every glass smelled like the color
blue, we drank scent, watched a huddle of mangoes 
draw the dawn over themselves, estranging common theories

 of light. These images yours before they were mine.

There were canvases which you anointed on MySpace.
Idle Hand. Invasion. Leatherface. Today the pictures
don’t load. Every pixel a poor widow.

I cast out into the unmade, trying fruitlessly
to conjugate you. Voice, mood, tense. Fugue, Persian
blue proper, skein of Che, sold or unsold.

Your face, which I pocket. I squander. I spend
nowhere. I mislead. I see with the wrong retina
attachment, then erase it. Two visual planes inter-

posed.

Emiliano Zapata enshrined and released
in a fine spray, an acid articulating your hands. I wonder
how you decided on the title: I feel like you’re ey-

balling me dogg! (Sold) Who now

owns the original? What about the cobalt for that coin
of water? The elbows you always set to the correct
decade? Sketchbooks overwrought with women

whose hair dances harder than women?

I want my hair to dance like that, too. Nude now,
this concrete that stood in as your earliest instructor.
When did your absence begin to give me this? Greed

groping through the viscous dark.

Should I have to pick between recalling your face
or your name, which would I choose? The wings or the shuttling
wind? The angels or the apse? To take the image

or the substrate it clings to?

Daylight Savings

The carport is choking again. From rib to rib, old
industrial appliances gowned in rust. A rabbit hutch.
The barrel cactus & its blooming eye. Light hauled
in bulk. Pet carriers, dented lockers, cowbells dangling

from rafters. Upturned armchairs taught to ankle
daintily. Discards from dumpsters, thrift stores, tenant
death across the city. Grandma dragging home street
signs pitched from their sockets. Snipping two blue-

tipped fingers from a stranger’s succulent garden.
She shows me where to make my cut. Stashes chalk-
stick in highwater Levi’s. All of it is free if no one

will notice you took it.

Along her fence: SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED.
DANGER. ARCHERY RANGE DO NOT
ENTER. CROSS HERE. BIKE ROUTE.
1-800-FUELMAN. RELIEVES

FATIGUE. George bikes down the gravel
basin, bum leg buffeted by wind. Shelter threw
him out on his ass, Grandma says. So he gets
the couch, a Camel Light. Someone up the hill

has died & I will inherit his bird studies, thumb
fussing the plumes of a grayscale macaw. My
smudgings a new kind of flight.

Cops come quicker than rain & I swear I never
see Grandma sleep. Daily the cul-de-sac feigns
summer. Even in winter, we are castigated with
thirst. California like a stupor. California reading,

NO SE PERMITE ENTRADA. Entering any-
ways. In the canyon out back, coyote wails.
Brushfires seduced down to nothing. A flattened
treehouse that turned boys schizophrenic. The slack

barbed wire corroborates my belief, remakes my
knees. Irish is out of jail. Ron has written me
with a pencil sketch of my face done by a cellmate.
When money goes missing, my mother says, Look

who you let in. All those unlocked doors standing
around like dumb blondes.

The nails tell the full story. Or the teeth. No such
thing as fine linen in a place like that. Grandma
is trying to get someone to shower, or threatening
to kill Chuck for hitting Patty again, or icing her

own eye. I want to see the cactus’ retina detach.
I want to be gone by the time the dishes shatter. I
tell Fartoon to drop me off up the street. She’s being
polite, but I insist. I’m worried she’ll see an uncle

talking to himself, shadow-boxing a draft. Yo
swinging by with free weed for the voices. Rafa or
Ruben or Robin in his denim short-shorts. Hilda
with more bad news from Mexico. Home is a lost-

and-found, a document we’ve dislocated, a junk-
yard of dog bones & used needles. It must be that

I’m embarrassed by what’s legible.

Right here is fine, I tell her, by the diamond-
shaped DEAD END.

Ghost!

Divine roaches, or what the roaches
divine from the interior walls. Double
back to the spinal bracings. Who else
nests there? Listless fingers. My dice
sprouting fur, gnashing their milk teeth.
Wind load. Gorgeous horizontal forces.
The toy phone is ringing off the hook &
when I pick up, the voice on the other
end brings me news of Tita’s travels.
Numerous grandmothers, living & not.
I wonder who believes in me better.
Graffiti rabbits steal glances over our
shoulders, ushering shy pets upstairs.
The lens developing callouses & the balls
of the feet opaque, unseeing as indigo
stones. A noose of braided hair for 
the Eastern European salon. After, in the car,
I cry like I’m dead. A husk. A sloughed
off tail from the fence lizard. This second
life is hot pink, wears removable Party
City wings. Curriculum of being—its
feigned conjugations. Demons slant
towards me lengthwise like hot rain &
I lie there in awe of them & their sartorial
design. They remind me to turn off the box
fan. The stucco searing in its pockmarked
stare. Mute penny. Priestly spying eye
devoted to playing doll with my dramas.
Candle stem. Alive. Spume. Alive. Scrim.
Alive again. The photograph’s incessant faces,
craning back to get a good look at me. Is it
possible death is graduation? Inside the 
operating theater of Heaven, all my angels 
love their lobotomies & all my images remove 
their hose one leg at a time, genitals flashing God.