Bird Eating Bird (5 page)
Authors: Kristin Naca
No quiero ya no quiero
la sucia sucia sucia luz del día.
lejana infancia paraíso cielo
oh seguro seguro paraíso.
I don’t want anymore don’t want
the dirty foul rancid light of day
distance infancy paradise heaven
oh safe certain paradise.
—
Idea Vilariño
Con latigo de madera, un joven sin camisa
rechazaba los penachos de pasto de la pradera.
Detras de él un tren cruzaba pararelo sobre la tierra llanera.
El vidrio tranquilizaba todas las heridas altas.
Bajé las ventanas y las brisas se pincharon
a las briznas filosas de nuestro aliento usado
que se habían desenrollado en la cabina del camión.
No tener prisa para contarlo mientras manejaba ella.
Abandonado, el joven volvía al germen en el retrovisor.
Las pistas se caían a plomo hacia un barranco
que se ha secado y el tren seguía hacia el fondo.
Quizá la palabra sentida sería abismo.
A boy bare-chested with a switch
beat back the plumes of the prairie grasses.
Behind him a train filed parallel over the plain land.
The glass tranquilized any loud wounds.
I rolled down the window and breezes
needled the wooly ends of used-up breath
that had unspooled into the truck cabin.
No hurry to tell the story as she drove.
The boy went to seed in the rearview mirror.
The tracks plummeted into a defunct ravine
and the train followed down the hollow.
Or, was the right word for it chasm.
My cousin Sonny missions with her kids in the Philippines.
In Pittsburgh, Constance and Reyanne come to the door. We’ve met before at another address.
Through the lead-glass window: they straighten their scarves, teeth, when they hear footsteps clanging near the door.
They don’t remember my stream-lined teeth, my globy lips or eyes from all the heads they meet.
My cousin Sonny’s a Witness, too,
I tell them.
She missions with her kids in the Philippines.
Down Atlantic Avenue, a year before, I said,
Come back and meet Faith, the owner. She’s new in town and needs to make more friends.
Today, they ask if I follow faith and I decline,
an atheist.
And they ring their knuckles—screw fingers around their moldy joints like a nut-cracker’s teeth.
My cousin Jing Jing—Sonny’s sister—a Witness, too
, I say as they clang the pages of their good books, fingering for a tooth of conversation.
Constance and Reyanne don’t rush into talking. Mornings, they buzz by the doors like flies.
And I’m patient with them—out of respect for the cousins—while teeming in the hot, Pittsburgh dust I carry in a suitcase from home to home.
Jing Jing is my favorite name
, is what I long to tell them.
What’s your favorite name?
I long to ask.
Once, in Seattle, I was bald and breezes slid easily from my gut. I’d say,
Make like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and count me out.
Once, Sonny and Jing came out to the S.F. Airport to see Puring and me as we stretched our good leg out to the Philippines.
They kept a glowy silence about my head as we teetered past the clanging Krishnas.
Love balled through my bare skin. A brilliant passport.
In the P.I., Puring and I visited Uncle Ulpiano—their father—a stroke had left a golden sore in his eye.
Faith is a photo of Ulpe, a Ranger in WWII, closed in the dusty pages of a book, his corners shrunken and torn, footless from all the marching.
A friend of my grandfather’s taught Ulpe to read. For the god’s-sake of this story, we’ll call her Faith.
Constance and Reyanne smile when I say:
“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love”
then they frown, “Our souls just mush under
bootsoles,
long to be eaten by grassy teeth.”
Ulpe doesn’t recognize my brilliant head. Thinks I’m the younger brother. My name nonsense.
With the Pacific conquered, Truman took the ones who read and sent the rest packing.
When Constance and Reyanne hit the books again, I want to say, faith and belief, a foggy bathroom mirror, a raincoat on the man who drags a suitcase full of dictionaries door to door.
Today’s forecast, humidity: I heat myself, I heat my hand, I heat the air inside my hand like a handful of warm, glass marbles.
I can’t believe they call me Sister anyway. When they’re just Constance and Reyanne to me, the same as Jing and Sonny.
Their pamphlet charges to my sweat and releases a green sore of ink in my palm.
—
San Antonio, TX. Reviews not yet available.
A leathery tobacco stain where her knuckle creases.
Limón
in the taco grease licked off of lovers’ fingers.
Tonight the sheets will yellow beneath the dim light bulbs.
A yellow kiss.
love plagues the Earth.
How water from the marred glass roughens her top lip.
Exhaust the nylon rug kicks up. The pink sink. The mirror above the sink that forces a ripple through her gut. The smile that’s a water-stain on the smoky curtains. A pillow that—for the most part—lovers use for balancing. The cataract bluing the tube inside the ancient TV set. The showers that run all day and swell the hallway with their sweat. The dewy pillow against her face. A plague of love upon her.
For hours the lovers’ feet kick at the woozy nightstand.
Santa Biblia
in gold leaf on the good book on the nightstand.
Brown nipples that start to fade as she ages, that metallic pussy smell, how the grain of her cunt toughens around her fingers when she comes, the veneer of as a mouth.
Blood that starts to slough off once her breath has dried it to her lips.
Combing fingers through the red carpet fronds, searching for her glasses.
Side-by-side the blisters raise in the shape of teeth.
Friday nights, the images
of hot tubs, Manhattans,
and blondes fingering the hair
on Cliff Barnes’ chest tickled
my Auntie Linda until she cried,
Aiiieeeee!
Auntie Ning beside her
rolled cotton balls in tubes
she used to dab the cheap nail
polish that pooled between
her cuticle and skin.
Days, Auntie Linda worked
at Hair Cuttery. In her chair,
clients were mortified to hear,
Sagging breasts means sagging hair,
as Linda parted their wet mops
down the middle for effect.
Nights, I painted my nails
Pearlucious.
I begged for
Ruby Red
.
But Linda said,
That’s an old,
white ladies color. They leave quarters.
Their husbands leave watches.
Auntie Ning hiked up a pant leg,
and I dug my fingers into her calf.
She writhed and slapped at the thin rug,
tossed over holes in the thinning carpet.
Meanwhile, J.R. tippled scotch.
Close-up, wordlessly, he scolded me
for carving grids in the lotion
I lathered on Ining’s legs.
Ice clinked in J.R.’s glass. Crystal,
it twinkled in the light. He took
a swig and said,
If you point
a double barrel shot gun at me,
you better fire both barrels.
Linda worked on Ning with
a chopping motion that prompted
her to tell the story of how she
wanted to karate chop the neck
of gentlemen clients who waited
by her car to ask her out. I was ten.
Even then, I figured she also
meant my father, who teased her
at dinner,
You touch dirty old men,
when every morning he tramped
the hallway in a towel, his package
swashbuckling hip to hip.
When I rubbed Linda’s tiring
hands, she said I should work
with her, Saturdays nights,
tips plus ten bucks an hour.
Sue Ellen carried John Ross to the jet.
Back then I wondered, who calls
a child by such an adult name?
The child who, a season later,
is eight years old. After two more,
he turns fourteen. A hiatus and
he returns to Southfork, to learn
to pick flesh and blood
apart just like his father.
Un pescador
en la cama del río,
un gusano
tan enfriado como
leche en la mano,
ensarta el anzuelo
anillo a través
de los bulbos
de la carne.
Penetrado
se afloja
como una cintilla
que se quita
de la rueda
y se llena
con polvo.
El cielo está gris.
El pescador
coge la caña,
trozo de plomo
con forma de lágrima,
lastra
la línea de seda,
a la vez que hunde
su palma
en el corque
del mango.
Al tirar la línea,
dibuja semicírculos
en el aire,
ese movimiento sutil
como una hoz
y el aire suelta
una soporosa queja
mientras la línea
siega por encima.
La línea vacila,
sobre la expansión
de agua, gira
el cilindro de la trampa
de la línea tan rápido
que el huso chirria
como lo misma
pena de las visagras
de la puerta enojada.
El pescador espera
oír el sonido
roto por el projectil
el silencio del agua
antes de buscar
la carnada donde
las pequeñas ondas
se combaten por
el agua más allá.
A fisherman
on a river bed,
a worm
cool as milk
in his hand,
threads his silver
hook through
the bulbs of
the worm’s body.
Pierced
it goes slack
as tape drawn off
a wheel and
sated with dust.
The sky is gray.
The fisherman
grabs his pole,
tear-shaped iron
weights ballast
the fishing line
as he sinks
his palm into
the groove he wears
and wears into
the handle’s cork.
Casting he loops
the line behind him
and swings it
keen as a sickle
and the air lets go
of a sleepy groan
when the line
mows over it.
The line across
the water’s
expanse spins
the barrel of the
fishing line’s trap,
so fast the spindle
moans like an angry
door’s hinges.
Then the fisherman
waits for a plunk
before he searches
for his bait
where the ripples
already gang up
in the water
beyond him.
Auntie Ining renders fat from slabs of pork she’s cut into cubes.
At the kitchen table, I render “Scene from the Garden of Gethsemane” in chalk, in the backdrop a greasy staccato.
Sweeten your tongue to the roof of your mouth till /e/s come out, if you want to pronounce Auntie I’s name.
Today begins Elvis week and I’s heart pounds, Elvis sweetening her meaty lining.
Though her name’s the shape of an “I,” Auntie I’s the shape of an O. In childhood fotos an O. A wonder she’s ever known love.
A returning G.I., E’s sweet on a girl rendered helpless when she loses her top in the staccato of waves.
At the party that night, he renders a song he sweetens with dance, a shag in his tail for the swoony damsels.
When I look down, eyelids of apostles are sweetened shut from too much dust, all my overtouching.
When Elvis clenches his jaw as someone else speaks, it’s all his overacting.
Tupelo, Mississippi, 1929. A child who would be a very tan king is born.
On the TV Elvis soothes the savage gypsies who store booty in a shiny caboose; the Acapulco cliff divers; shirtless, trapeze artists; a tizzy of dizzy love-hung women; seriously, devoutly, desperately nuns; bullfighters—make that one.
Ah, but Don Pedro can this one sing?
All along, the black gum in our front yard fizzes with caterpillars; locusts scorch the sky with a sticky, torch song.
In some other cases, the black gum’s rendered, the black tupelo and the tupelo gum.
In waves the curious neighbors clench at the brown woolies barking up the black gum’s skin.
“Green surrenders to a staccato of Os,” goes the leaves’ fading stomata.
When the black gum’s leaves go faint and holy, my parents put their feelers on.
At dusk, the dusty apostles also fade as Christ begs for strength in the face of death!
How the silky caterpillars litter the pavement, falling through the holes they’ve eaten, to death.
With our fingers, we clench ice cream scoops between saltines, sweeten avocado with sugar and swoon.
When Auntie I rings fizz from the Os of a sponge, her fingers bark from all the bleaching.
“She’s as big as a house,” Mom and Dad pound her when she isn’t around or isn’t looking.
She steeps her branch in the murky water, fingers for the rice sweetening the bottom of the pan.
Pick your poison
, says the neighbor, a peevish red bud blooming in his yard.
Gripped with love, I pound white rice until I’m full, white bread till I’m numb.
A chalk of scorched meat on the bottom of the pan. An oily O on the chicharrón rag.
Outlines of apostles I’ve fingered into Os, even scalded with grease they keep sleeping.
When Dad starts with war buddies burning monkeys from trees, Mom goes to sweep the brown woolies to the street.
I gum on the chewy chicharrón bark, at the fatty white parts: hard swallow.
If food is love, pound-for-pound, Auntie Ining’s
a hunk o’ hunk o’
.
Wise men say
: “When Christ calls, fill his jug with laughter, his eye sockets with song.”
No black people sun in
Blue Hawaii,
nor
Fun in Acapulco, ni viven en Las Vegas tampoco,
leaving one explanation: too tan.
In a canoe Elvis fingers his tiny instrument. O flaming ukulele of passion! Ukelele of desire!
What a gas
. Dad pounds his foot, sweetening his story with,
The singed bodies fizzed.
Elvis, have you ever known love? Have you ever never wanted the girl and still known love?
A ticked off Mom and Dad tweeze bodies with fingers through their spiny hair.
I watch them in wonder through the kitchen window, the two Os in the front of my head.