Abacus, Panic, The Eyes Open to a Cry
ABACUS
How do I tell the woman who cleans
my house the difference between knives?
That the serrated are cheap, meant
only for dining, the larger blades for husking
flesh away from its bone, their finer edges
to wait in phalanx at the wooden block.
This luxury of sifting divisions exists
for me, a twenty-seven year old brown woman
who shouldn't have a housekeeper, but I'm dirty
with dollars, Juárez at the end of my window,
Juanita walking the bridge over to get here.
Last Christmas, cartel thugs hustled my friend
Martín, pushed their thumbs into his delicate
places, cracked collar bones for a teacher's salary,
while Juanita, laying down next door, counted
copper jackets newly sheathed to her walls.
How do you begin to count how many bullets
are shattering your panes? She cups her
daughter's nervous belly, fingers the puckered
navel, hums into the growing ear there, 1, 2, 3, each
beat like systole, diastole, a verse made to cleave one moment from another. No decapitations
today, she tells me, though her neighbor hung
himself this week, and she wipes the grease
away from my steaming counters, while I separate
one blade to lie away from another.
PANIC
They are tearing out
the roof in clumps, tar plunging
from the mouths of shovels, and at the donor bank they call me
a difficult bleed, use a scale
to measure the minimum charge given
in me. A woman breathes
down your neck, pleading you to turn on
the oven. Like this the world is always
on the verge, love
a forgotten sorrow. The better act
is always lost, a new roof a practice
in pollution: anxious heart slow, gaseous burn,
and in the neighboring city fifteen men drop
their hands to their knees machine-gunned
at the drug rehabilitation center. This is the desert, after
all. We are always suffering
the shape of the wind. We are always shifting where
shifting requires, and you love me
the way a child loves his mother, which is to say the body
growing and separate. Over and over
you clutch at my wrist my breast the bruised inner
of my elbow, our crotches a raw
nest of stitches, brillo rubbing the other
rudely, and this is how we go on
sharing passports and nightmares, the circulated air
between borders, your nipples erect,
and the dead around us mineral, and rising.
THE EYES OPEN TO A CRY
Blood moves her from the bedroom
to the bathroom, her body pulled
away from the crescent of her lover
in ended eclipse, and her toes tent
on the tile as she pleats the warm
cloth over her hips. Each cycle shapes
its own new stain, the irregular edges
of wetness sinking into dryer thread,
and like this, she is still startled
to discover the appearance of her private
self, the red moon announcing her
as if her own face. This morning, the sun
has spilled circles all over the old wood
floors, slipped through the grain, and in
Juárez seven more are dead as she washes
the blood from her underwear, the field
in which the men played soccer sinking
in with human weight. She wrings
the cloth, pulls the string. Does what
she must. The wives in Juárez are used
to slumping their bellies to their knees
while the sun in El Paso kaleidoscopes
her, cleaner now, through the circles,
squinting past the loud windows
and back in the soft cave of her
bedroom, where her husband is breathing
into the brown right angle of his elbow.
In grass another woman stops breathing.
The cheeks of the man she loves
are stitched into the seams of his own
soccer ball, and the women move, each
to the extension of their selves, one
from blood, the other, toward, both
knowing the compression of their ribs
above the cardinal heart as their men
lay sweetly, their rest perpetual
only to the plumb line of the moon.
Blood moves as they crawl to him, raise
his arms and wade into his murky
torso—blood over them and through
them, masking the butterflied pelvis—
and threading them, calling them through
their veils of sleeping and waking.
