Bird Eating Bird (2 page)

What use is there for describing

Bloomfield’s hard-sloping rooftops this way?

Or that the church steeples beam upward, inexpertly

toward God. What difference does it make

to say, the chimney pipes peel their red skins,

or
las pieles rojas,
exposing tough steel underneath.

What good, then, for Spanish,

its parity of consonants and vowels—

vowels like a window to the throat,

breath chiming through the vocal chords.

And what good is singing to describe

this barrio’s version of the shortened sky,

el cielo cortado
—power lines crisscrossing

so high, that blue only teases through them.

And what for fog
la niebla arrastra,

creeping down
las calles inmóviles

before the bank and grocery store open.

Y por la zapatería
on Liberty Avenue,

a lady’s antique boot for a street sign.

And by the shoemaker’s

What use to remember in any language

my father was a Puerto Rican shoe salesman.

From his mouth dangled a ropy, ashy cigarette.

He spoke good English and knew when to smile.

fishing nets

With his strong fingers he’d knot shoes like
redes,

knew three kinds of knots so lady customers

could buy the shoes they loved to look at

but really shouldn’t have worn.

At home, Dad kept his
lengua íntima

to himself. His Spanish not for children,

only older relatives who forced him to speak,

reminded,
Spanish means there’s another person

inside you
. All beauty, he’d argue, no power in it.

Still, I remember, he spoke a hushed Spanish

to customers who struggled in English, the ones

he pitied for having no language to live on.

So many years gone, what use to invent

or question him in Pittsburgh? The educated one,

why would I want my clumsy Spanish to stray

from the pages of books outward? My tongue,

he’d think so untrue and inarticulate. Each word

having no past in it. What then? Speaking Spanish

to make them better times or Pittsburgh

a better place.
En vez de regresar la dura realidad

del pasado.
And then, if I choose to speak like this

who will listen?

Instead of returning
to the hard reality
of the past

After its lip

the bottle flares out

like the A-line of

a girl’s skirt

when she twirls

at recess.

On the descent

the company’s crest—

one red and one blue

crescent about to

clasp together

into a globe

but between

them, the name

of the soda sits

in bold, white letters.

Below

the slogan

the tiny print:

contenido neto
355
ml,

and
hecho en México,

in perfectly

executed paint.

Partway down

the bottle corners

into a barrel-shape,

the swiveled glass,

the same as stripes

of a barber’s pole, forces

the eye to follow

and twist along its

blurred contours,

the way skin blurs

the contours of

an arm so you

slow down into

the elbow’s nook.

And how much

like skin the peach

and brown and blue

reflections inside

the glass lend it

dimension while outside

the surface and shape

are seamless, but

for some stitching

underneath, a zipper

dialed around the

bottle’s base to

serve as feet.

And where

the glass corners

from cone to barrel

a ring carved from

the bottles being

packed too close

and rubbing together

in their crates.

Scars that

keep dry and

soft as silk, even as

the glass beads, and

you start to trace

the droplets back

over the powder,

and still dry after

you’ve swabbed up

the condensation

and your fingers

have gone clumsy

from the bottle’s

brittle sweat.

When the bottle’s

this cold, the swivels

of glass are charged,

icy bulbs that steal

heat from the nubs

of your fingertips,

so you rub them

to your forehead

and feel nothing

but your own heat

swirl back and forth

from your head

to your hand.

Each time you drink—

the bubbles rising up

through the sweet,

brown liquid, stirring

your nose, then lips—

how easily details

of time slip away and

you’re seven-years-old

again drinking Pepsi

at the
sari-sari
store

next to Uncle Ulpe’s

house in Manila. And

you guzzle it down.

The taller men with baseball bats, a tree branch garbled with knots,

log iron, and leftover pipe from the fence they put up last summer.

The shorter men gripping buck knives for slashing at the pig’s neck.

And ripened on a dry slop of peanuts, cornflakes, and newspaper

shavings, moiled between the washer and dryer and shelves of dust-caked

soda bottles, the pig that grew tall enough to sniff and lick the doorknob.

So, from the other side, I watched it turn and, hearing it flicker at night,

dreamt of succoring the pig’s escape. Then, they unleashed it. It

drumming its blunt, fleshy hammers through the downstairs hallway,

its high-pitched cough the air it dragged over vocal chord lathing.

Then, they prodded it across the yard and cornered it under the porch.

So with a
ka-thunk
the pig, then stilled in its tracks, had to watch

as one of the men crept up and dragged a knife across its neck.

They held the sullen body in their pink, craggy hands, standing up,

in order to catch its blood in a bucket. Blood Mother cooked

into a musty, black blood-food we smothered our rice in. After that,

the men heaved the body on a picnic table wrapped in Glad bags

and tape and rolled the carcass on its back and split the skin down

the long belly, its guts oozing out—all beigy, peachy, and blue like

clouds of chewed bubble-gum or the bulbs of a wilted, worn-in coin purse.

Collapsed hoses, too soft and slick to pile up, spread across the lawn

in pearly pools. Then, carefully, the men excised the gall bladder

before it broke and spoiled the meat, gallbladder curled like a finger

on a folding chair beside them while they emptied the carcass to the snout.

On the grass, the heart and lungs lay, and the throat ridged and perfect

as a staircase. And then, the new backbone a metal rod they pierced

and guided through the carcass. Tackle they hoisted onto some posts,

so—though I can’t remember exactly—they could turn the whole thing

on a spit. How it hovered for hours over the orange coals that startled

whenever the juices dripped, and the rangy smell of singed pork-meat

and charcoal slinked into our sweat, and the pork skin transluted, cells

shimmering amber and snapping easily to the touch, hot loosened fat

down our fingers, until the meat fell apart without having to hack at it.

The men, smoking packs of Kool cigarettes and piling up the empty

Schlitz beer cans, hardly mentioning a thing about the child.

Listen and you’ll hear a knock.

Watch the dust lift off the land.

Pray I give up my cane and walk.

Some wind will tear the ears off stalks

Of corn; no sound eviscerates the strand.

I listen close, but hear no knock.

Each footstep, I mill bones to chalk.

Then, sink in soot wherever I stand.

I dream I give up my cane and walk.

In nightmares, wispy pipe-roots block

The blood flow to a leaf-foot, browning, orphaned

On the stem. Listless, I hear the knock

Of the oxygen machine. The good doc

Strings me up a foot, leaves me bland,

Yellow toes. “Go ahead and walk,”

Doc says and hacks the cast to a caulk

Of gauze, peat hair, and loose, tanned

Skin Nurse swabs. Like clockwork knock

Gulls at my windowsill. That bad flock,

The smallest sores pique their demands.

Listen. Do you hear them knock?

Do I pray harder? Wake up. Walk.

Through the doors gleam pyramids

of apples, peaches, broccoli hybrids.

I pronounce a name in Minh,
kài lán,

pull back its leaves, and reveal small,

white flowers. All to watch her mouth

the words and make white flowers

translations. She asks what
uppo
is

and I tell her how my auntie grew

the woody fruit by foot-long beans,

tomatoes my father claimed to grow

on his own. If she needs more, I’ll list

ingredients like a poem, like garlic

onion, ground pork, and potatoes.

Vegetables I don’t have words for

stew for an hour in that poem.

We don’t last long before the blitz

of shiny packaging overwhelms her.

One sea green cellophane submits

to a lime, pea, then a teal wrapper,

the lucky elephant or lotus stamp,

the photographs of curious

food items that luxuriate in broth,

a cartoon sketch of a boy’s face

above some steam lines and a bowl—

delight the angle that his eyes slant

as he devours the noodles. Brands

we differentiate by script, each lilt

depicts the path a language takes

to conquer, infiltrate, or drift.

Some brushstrokes end in a tip

sharp as my tongue when I dish out

old-fashioned, Asian lady barking.

The aisles feed into a basin where

aquariums line the walls, and fish

glint beneath fluorescent light bulbs.

When I say,
So gorgeous, I feel guilty

eating them
, that’s not the half of it.

Next week, we trade-in excess beauty

to shop at the markets my Mother

took me—and I still shop as though

my girlfriend and I had never met,

where we fish beans from boxes;

dodge old ladies throwing elbows

at the fruit bins; scales unraveling

off a fish when a butcher knocks

the daylights out of it. And in time

come the meals we dine on chicken

that stinks of piss-soaked feathers.

Dos / doze / those / toes
shuffles through my head

when Grandma speaks, consonants blurred

from her mouth a flat tire. Unable to make out

each word I try reading lips,
What / that / cat woman,

but end up lost. Her lips relaxed, bursts of sound

fretting through them.
You muddy her,
Grandma barks

at my father.
You muddy her, she drives you grazy.

A child, I love their arguments, never fully

understanding what Grandma means when

she tells Dad,
She get you rosin / rousing / rosing.

You watch. She geep driving you grazy.
Though

I do get when Grandma says, /
gahng
/, for
can,

and when she says, /
gahng
/, for
can’t.

When she curses, wants sympathy—like,

/ Gahng / it raw meat. It gives you gancer.

Look it’s / rrrud /
, she blusters. Her r

like she’s starting a lawn mower.
/ Rrraw / meat,

Charlie
, she argues, shows it to my father.

Marinade,
he answers. And Grandma gives up.

A martyr she says,
Go on, it it.
Her tongue

forcing sparks from our household English.

Beauty when she grabs her chest and sighs,

I gahng go up dos stairs, Charlie. My art, my art!

O the Eyes that will see me,

And the Mouth that will kiss me.

And the Rose I will stand on,

And the Hand that will turn me.

—
José García Villa

She watches from the chair.

Two lovers unlock the hatches

of each other’s shirts. Crowbarring

of their wasp-sprung mouths where lips

eave together. Their bras barbed

to the bed. When their arms sigh

into place       the fireplace toolery.

In an hour or so the phone rings.

The receiver from her paw—knuckles

fast and cum-crusted—to the spotty

drop cloth. In her ear the rumpus

it’s 10:00       it’s 10:00

across the bed          
h h h

h
all the air at her back

h
breath on her neck and neck on her lips

h
quickened over a scissor leg

when
h
threads her arm across the other lovers

she scores homophones

there      
their
they’re

My magandang
naman.
*
Don’t have any

words for making this better. Sadness,

perfect leavening, tugs the heart’s ill-fitting

What capacity feels like: emptiness and

ache. A backwardly line, the needle luring

thread though the holes that’ve been pierced already. Stars, so

gravity-cooked, they

bead to cushioning blackness. Tell
as much as

need be:
Nothing can worsen how she feels now.

Tell yourself, about anything you need to.

Heart, rest a little.