We Melted, We Welded, We Forged
On Westminster Street. On a day with a cold, cruel sun.
When you left Providence, the river & I with our lithium blue
cries howled for you across I-95. At White Electric, batch
after batch of coffee burned behind the counter; each pitcher
of milk scalded in its glass. All of the oversized armchairs lost
their cushion—they couldn’t comfort anyone with you gone.
Riffraff boarded up with no more books to show you, no
more late night love poems, written in the haze of headlights
aimed north towards Boston. This town & I are the same:
we both want to be more than a place people pass through.
So I take our pocket sized city to the post office, sure
I could ship all of Providence to you for 68 cents. Please,
I tell the postman. We’ve got a problem that can’t be folded
down. Without you, red bricks are crumbling inside the center
of the city’s ventricles. Rhode Island’s lockbox lungs are full
of Atlantic seawater, & we’re wrecked across the wooden
railing of our boxed up house. That day, when you challenged
the sun to a bar fight & lost, when you swallowed the darts
of your own despair, when I found you, on Westminster,
welded to your life like the stainless steel joint of a railcar
I knew; nothing could keep you here any longer. & so
I understand, beloved, that you have to leave the Ocean
State & all its anchors. Just know that around the corner
from the Kwikie Mart lives a collection of glowing red letter
signs, promising that somewhere, in some forgotten alley,
there’s a door that’s still open, asking for you to come in.
Ode to the Hoarders
“The library will endure; it is the universe.”
—Jorge Luis Borges
Adoring architects,
Sculpting cities of newspapers
& burnt out bulbs.
Rome wasn’t built in a day,
It was years of collected dreams.
& you look for God in every
Thing. Sure that one of these days,
He’ll be at the bottom of a hefty bag
With the fish bones & milk cartons. Another
Ordinary love, cluttered & disposed
Of—don’t you want to be brave?
Enough to see it all as worth saving?
Real Magic
Is that my grandmother died before she could see
what they did to her country. Years ago,
we buried her beneath the prickly pears
in the backyard. Prayed that she’d never go hungry
again. But land, like family, remembers sins
that can never be forgiven. Looking back,
I can almost see it: the time when rain would run
home to the body it came from.
For centuries, Lake Texcoco swayed in her jade skirt,
hair braided into a chinampa of reeds,
growing the way only a woman who is loved
can grow. Then, the Spanish. A city built
like a scab over a wound. At the end of each visit,
when I had to let Mexico go like a firefly
from my knuckled fist, my grandmother would trace
a circle on the back of my hand.
Who are we if not our history of thirst?
