YEAR OF THE DOG

hot in the year of the dog, i sip whiskey and coke on my rooftop; sparrows weaving together this summer evening full of nothing but two shirtless Mexicans, my neighbors, mustached Elvises in the twilight, who once took a chicken apart with gloves of blood and feathers, and now pick-ax a gravel echo deep in the back alley of this immigrant tale leading to dust and broken bottles

one of them, wiping away the sun’s last rays from his forehead, looks up and stares at the heart within the cough of his sweaty son, or brother, cousin, fellow man

they come, i know, for their children, these two Ezekiels of daily-dishwashed hands and fry-pocked countenance; come for their women, raven-maned Marias hanging damp tube socks, stained workshirts, and pajama tops from branches and chain link; come like anyone to this neighborhood in Minneapolis, from Mexico, Sudan, the hills of Laos and Tien Shen Mountains, packed at the backs of night banana trucks; faceless, alienesque ghosts in border patrol heat-sensing photos, stuffed in shrimp trawlers and gassy trunks of cars, each day negotiating a border of stars, hauling summer nights and salty dreams, lit by Bics and stooped by the moon on their backs. come because God intoned they’d otherwise end up like him, on a fishhook in the sea

only to arrive late every night like my mother, who places her cast-iron rice cooker of twenty years on the curb. through the window i watch not her stoop and limp, but the dilapidated slippers which carry her to this far end of the world; helpless slippers i once hid, but long to eat now from the dumpster of my dreams

visions, incantations
so slippery tonight, in hands clinking dishes, turning bolts; listen closely how they chop, slice, zip, sew, push, pull, tug, bend, but never ever break; see their swollen factory feet years underneath eyes bleary on Sunday evenings at the Target on Lake Street, four minutes before closing, an entire Somali family parts the doors like a sea of glass, Mother cloaked in blue tunic and hijab, Father in flip-flops, five young children inside; the smallest of them stops and stares back at me through Mohammedan angel eyes, holding a potted cactus and Koran, as if challenging me to remember his fate. is he our hero at age seven, or the villain?

come for your job, your home, you daughter's blonde uterus, your son’s black soul; the Laudromat your family built up and protected with bullets of sweat, only to watch it torn down by similar fingers clutching torches and shopping carts loaded down with beef and stereo equipment, L.A. Riots '92!, like locusts come, killer bees, gypsy moths you can’t see stealing fruit in their infinitesimal hands, tax dollars, unemployment; come to ESL classes, stretching verbs and adjectives to place their plucked tongues back on mango trees, chestnut, rambutan; stumbling through burning jungle brush and a heaven of metal detectors, skipping over a dozen words for water; a scale of scars from para-military raids in the dark, tattoos sun- and wind-carved like mishealed wing joints, fleeing fourteen year old soldiers wielding hacksaws across scorched savanna

only to end up in Fargo, Rochester, Wabasha, Wisconsin, humming along to the pitch and fall of a snowy drift alone in a borrowed bedroom; refugees from Bosnia and Saigon, come to till the abandoned prairies, ghost towns of a century and a half ago, where Swedish songs of sugar beet farmers mist the one-room church houses

if you concentrate, you can still hear their wails in the wind; journey the spine of abandoned railroads on the Dakota Plains to the end of civilization, past vagrant, shot-through Indian reservations, and you know how they came, but where did they go?

these guardians of the night’s floating soul; these aching knees, palms and fingernails hauling ten generations of shadow and soil

this family living next door in the twilight...

who used to be my own.

© 2005 from Real Karaoke People: Poems and Prose (New Rivers Press)—Publication Date: October 2005