Read an Excerpt
My Nature Is Hunger: New & Selected Poems 1989â?"2004
By Luis J. Rodríguez OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2005 Luis J. Rodríguez
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4532-5910-8
CHAPTER 1
Running to America
For Alfonso and Maria Estela Rodríguez, migrants
They are night shadows violating borders,
fingers curled through chain-link fences,
hiding from infra-red eyes, dodging 30–30 bullets.
They leave familiar smells, warmth and sounds
as ancient as the trampled stones.
Running to America.
There is a woman in her finest border-crossing wear:
A purple blouse from an older sister,
a pair of worn shoes from a church bazaar,
a tattered coat from a former lover.
There is a child dressed in black,
fear sparkling from dark Indian eyes,
clinging to a headless Barbie doll.
And the men, some hardened, quiet,
others young and loud—you see something
like this in prisons. Soon they will cross
on their bellies, kissing black earth,
then run to America.
Strange voices whisper behind garbage cans,
beneath freeway passes, next to broken bottles.
The spatter of words, textured and multi-colored,
invoke demons.
They must run to America.
Their skin, color of earth, is a brand
for all the great ranchers, for the killing floors
on Soto Street and as slaughter
for the garment row. Still they come:
A hungry people have no country.
Their tears are the grease of the bobbing machines
that rip into cloth
that make clothes
that keep you warm.
They have endured the sun's stranglehold,
el cortito, foundry heats and dark caves
of mines, swallowing men.
Still they come, wandering bravely
through the thickness of this strange land's
maddening ambivalence.
Their cries are singed with fires of hope.
Their babies are born with a lion
in their hearts.
Who can confine them?
Who can tell them
which lines never to cross?
For the green rivers, for their looted gold,
escaping the blood of a land
that threatens to drown them,
they have come,
running to America.
Somebody Was Breaking Windows
Somebody was breaking the windows
out of a 1970s Ford.
Somebody's anger, for who knows what,
shattered the fragile mirror of sleep,
the morning silence
and chatter of birds.
A sledge hammer in both hands then crashed
onto the side of the car,
down on the hood,
through the front grill and headlights.
This Humboldt Park street screamed
in the rage of a single young man.
Nobody got out of their homes.
Nobody did anything.
The dude kept yelling
and tearing into the car.
Nobody claimed it.
I looked out of the window as he swung again.
Next to me was a woman.
We had just awakened after a night of lovemaking.
Her six-year-old daughter was asleep
on a rug in the living room.
The woman placed her arms around me
and we both watched through the louver blinds.
Pieces of the car tumbled
onto steamed asphalt.
Man hands to create it.
Man hands to destroy it.
Something about being so mad
and taking it out on a car.
Anybody's car.
I mean, cars get killed everyday.
I understood this pain.
And every time he swung down on the metal,
I felt the blue heat swim up his veins.
I sensed the seething eye staring from his chest,
the gleam of sweat on his neck,
the anger of a thousand sneers
—the storm of bright lights
into the abyss of an eyeball.
Lonely? Out of work? Out of time?
I knew this pain. I wanted to be there,
to yell out with him,
to squeeze out the violence
that gnawed at his throat.
I wanted to be the sledge hammer,
to be the crush of steel on glass,
to be this angry young man,
a woman at my side.
Rosalie has Candles
Rosalie has candles in a circle around her bed.
One night as I lay on a couch in a tequila stupor,
she takes off my shoes and trousers,
pulls a cover over me and snips two inches of hair
from my head. She places the hair in a glass
near the candles. I don't know why.
I don't know why she searches for me.
I don't know how she finds me in the bars.
I don't know why she ridicules the women I like
and uses me to meet men.
Rosalie usually finds solace in a glass
of whiskey. In my face she finds the same thing.
I don't know why. We argue too much.
We feign caring and then hurt each other
with indifference. With others we are tough
and mean. But in the quiet of darkness
we hold each other and caress like kittens.
She says she can only make love to someone
when she is drunk. She says she loves men
but has lesbian friends.
She loves being looked at. I want to hide.
She hates struggle. That's all I do.
She has Gods to pray to. I just curse.
I don't know what she sees in my face,
or hands for that matter. I only know
she needs me like whiskey.
The Monster
It erupted into our lives:
Two guys in jeans shoved it through the door
—heaving & grunting & biting lower lips.
A large industrial sewing machine.
We called it "the monster."
It came on a winter's day,
rented out of mother's pay.
Once in the living room
the walls seemed to cave in around it.
Black footsteps to our door
brought heaps of cloth for Mama to sew.
Noises of war burst out of the living room.
Rafters rattled. Floors farted
—the radio going into static
each time the needle ripped into fabric.
Many nights I'd get up from bed,
wander squinty-eyed down a hallway
and peer through a dust-covered blanket
to where Mama and the monster
did nightly battle.
I could see Mama through the yellow haze
of a single light bulb.
She slouched over the machine.
Her eyes almost closed.
Her hair in disheveled braids;
each stitch binding her life
to scraps of cloth.
Palmas
Palmas swayed on a rickety porch
near an old eaten-up tree
and plucked at a six-string:
The guitar man of the 'hood.
Fluid fingers moved across the neck
like a warm wind across one's brow.
Each chord filled with pain,
glory and boozed-up nights.
Every note sweating.
On Saturdays, Palmas jammed with local dudes.
They played in his honor on the nights
he didn't show up.
The guitar man—so sick, so tired,
but, man, he played so sweet.
I often wondered what gave Palmas his magic.
Blues bands wanted him.
Norteño bands wanted him.
Jazz musicians called out his name
from the bandstand.
He played Wes Montgomery
as if the dude were living inside his head.
He played crisp corridos and Jarocho blues
and seemed to make Jeff Beck
float through the living room window.
Yet he didn't venture too far beyond his rickety porch.
Sometimes he sat alone in his room,
the guitar on a corner of an unmade bed.
The last I heard, he played only
when the heroin in his body
gave him a booking.
Piece by Piece
Piece by piece
They tear at you:
Peeling away layers of being,
Lying about who you are,
Speaking for your dreams.
In the squalor of their eyes
You are an outlaw.
Dressing you in a jacket of lies
—tailor-made in steel—
You fit their perfect picture.
Take it off!
Make your own mantle.
Question the interrogators.
Eyeball the death in their gaze.
Say you won't succumb.
Say you won't believe them
When they rename you.
Say you won't accept their codes,
Their colors, their putrid morals.
Here you have a way.
Here you can sing victory.
Here you are not a conquered race
Perpetual victim
—the sullen face in a thunderstorm.
Hands/minds, they are carving out
A sanctuary. Use these weapons
Against them. Use your given gifts
—they are not stone.
The Calling
The calling came to me while I languished
in my room, while I whittled away my youth
in jail cells and damp barrio fields.
It brought me to life, out of captivity,
in a street-scarred and tattooed place
I called body.
Until then I waited silently,
a deafening clamor in my head,
but voiceless to all around,
hidden from America's eyes,
a brown boy without a name,
I would sing into a solitary
tape recorder, music never to be heard.
I would write my thoughts
in scrambled English;
I would take photos in my mind
—plan out new parks, bushy green, concrete free,
new places to play and think.
Waiting. Then it came. The calling.
It brought me out of my room.
It forced me to escape night captors
in street prisons.
It called me to war, to be writer,
to be scientist and march with the soldiers
of change.
It called me from the shadows, out of the wreckage
of my barrio—from among those
who did not exist.
I waited all of 16 years for this time.
Somehow, unexpected, I was called.
CHAPTER 2
Watts Bleeds
Watts bleeds, leaving stained reminders
on dusty sidewalks. Here where I strut alone,
as glass lays broken by my feet
and a blanket of darkness is slung
across the wood shacks of nuestra colonia.
Watts bleeds, dripping from carcasses of dreams.
Where despair is old people sitting on torn patio sofas
with empty eyes and children running down alleys
with big sticks.
Watts bleeds on vacant lots and burned-out building
—temples desolated by a people's rage.
Where fear is a deep river. Where hate is an overgrown weed.
Watts bleeds, even as we laugh, recall good times,
drink and welcome daylight through the broken windshield
of an old Impala.
Here is Watts of my youth, where teachers threw me
from classroom to classroom, not knowing where I could fit in.
Where I learned to fight or run, where I zigzagged down alleys,
jumped over fences, and raced by graffiti
on crumbling factory walls.
Where we played between the boxcars,
bleeding from the broken limbs and torn flesh,
and where years later we shot up heroin
in the playground of our childhood.
Watts bleeds as the shadow of the damned
engulfs all the chinga of our lives.
In the warmth of a summer night, gunshots echo their deadly song
through the silence of fear, prelude to a heartbeat.
Watts bleeds as I bled, getting laid-off from work,
standing by my baby's crib, touching his soft cheek
and fingering his small hand, as dreams shatter again,
dreams of fathers for little men.
Watts bleeds and the city hemorrhages,
unable to stop the flow from this swollen and festering sore.
Oh bloom, you trampled flower, come alive as once
you tried to do from the ashes.
Watts, bleeding and angry, you will be free.
Tía Chucha
Every few years Tía Chucha would visit the family
in a tornado of song and open us up
as if we were an overripe avocado.
She was a dumpy, black-haired
creature of upheaval who often came unannounced
with a bag of presents, including homemade
perfumes and colognes that smelled something like
rotting fish on a hot day at the tuna cannery.
They said she was crazy. Oh sure, she once ran out naked
to catch the postman with a letter that didn't belong to us.
I mean, she had this annoying habit of boarding city buses
and singing at the top of her voice—one bus driver
even refused to go on until she got off.
But crazy?
To me, she was the wisp of the wind's freedom,
a music-maker who once tried to teach me guitar
but ended up singing and singing,
me listening, and her singing
until I put the instrument down
and watched the clock click the lesson time away.
I didn't learn guitar, but I learned something
about her craving for the new, the unbroken,
so she could break it. Periodically she banished herself
from the family—and was the better for it.
I secretly admired Tía Chucha.
She was always quick with a story,
another "Pepito" joke or a hand-written lyric
that she would produce regardless of the occasion.
She was a despot of desire,
uncontainable as a splash of water
on a varnished table.
I wanted to remove the layers
of unnatural seeing,
the way Tía Chucha beheld
the world, with first eyes,
like an infant who can discern
the elixir within milk.
I wanted to be one of the prizes
she stuffed into her rumpled bag.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from My Nature Is Hunger: New & Selected Poems 1989â?"2004 by Luis J. Rodríguez. Copyright © 2005 Luis J. Rodríguez. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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