Bird Eating Bird_ Poems - Kristin Naca [4]
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.
GROCERY SHOPPING WITH MY GIRLFRIEND WHO IS NOT ASIAN
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.
LANGUAGE POETRY / GRANDMA’S ENGLISH
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
TRES MUJERES
1.
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
2.*
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