A Man Can Still Dream of Cigarettes

The Spanish teacher said you’ll know you've finally learned the language when the dream baby’s snake face looks up and says hola. I dreamed the real baby came too soon. We put her back and went to the rodeo where women wearing jeans without back pockets leaned hard around barrels and the dust did rain. The parenting book tries to explain how it feels likes you go to sleep in your bed and wake up in Mozambique. It could be China or Afghanistan. There are no camels in the Koran. We don't write what we know too well. We don't dream what we've already seen. Behind her tiny veined lids, the real baby’s eyes gallop. Two hours old, each dewy thought a shiny fire truck parting the Red Sea bellowing new. There is no need to seed her mind like clouds above a barely contained blaze. The parenting book doesn't try to explain how it feels to be born. There is no way to say I wonder in Spanish. A sign above the road says you too arrived here through a tunnel in the darkness. It could say you can't be lost if you don't have a map. There are no camels in El Salvador but there are black birds that back-flip on telephone wires. That is what some call a translation. The baby’s toes curl around my finger like tender claws. Somewhere oil fields burn endlessly, their confused faces clearly visible from outer space.

Published in Not For Mothers Only (Fence Books, 2007)

In Some Pregnant Dreams

You must leave Africa today
or maybe it’s China, wherever
you carry a leaky burlap sack of eels
then watch them writhe fire-like
in the bus’s crowded aisle.
No shit. No suitcase. No sushi.
No warning when you're let off
at the familiar high school to find
a standby ticket home. You forge
the signature fine but there’s a long
line outside the attendance office.
Listen up people, I don't have all day.
But you have all night. Deep in
the humid gymnasium, the dance team
can't get their high kicks in line
and your first boyfriend crouches
under the bleachers nursing
a spotty beard. He looks up
and says you were a good lay.
You weren't. But you were seventeen.
You were good for anything, even lying
in the scratchy grass near the triple-jump-pit.
It’s still field day and you win a three
-legged race alone. Somewhere in the distance
your name crawls itself through the megaphone
and the drum major who is your mother who
is your grandmother who is wearing
a sky-blue wool hat explains that the sneezes,
second spine, webbed feet and bag of elbows
doe-see-doeing inside you, honey,
that's real.

Published in No Tell Motel, Spring/07

The Body Before It is a Body

I could lie and say that
on the day my country most
recently went to war I at least
changed my plans but

I went skiing.

My hat was orange and warm.
The snow, at times, blinding.

The other landscape is always internal.
I was finally pregnant but no matter
how hard I listened I couldn't hear

the noise of so much fallen
snow as it tumbles
from the steepest rooftops.

I don't mean the way the bulk shudders
into the earth but the instant
of release itself

as when the body before it is a body knows better
than this world.

Below my feet a father shouted at his still growing
red-faced, snow-caked child, stop making noise
and do exactly what I tell you.

On the mountain, the first thing you learn is how to stop.

In my country orange means
everyone should be a little more
afraid than usual.

Published in Poets in Their Thirties as well as in ArtPace newsletter Winter/Spring 07.