Tejana Me
BY MARY ROBLES
like a dirt road is lonesome.
Tejana me has never left the rancho.
Tejana me wears coarse cloth, with dirty nails, laying
her hard hands in the pail of riverwater,
singing some ranchera about En esta viva,
las vacas estan conmigo pero tu se va, tu se va.
It’s hard for me from Tejas,
dragging her crooked denim skirts in grassless heat.
Dust & brittle shoes made of skin, the last cows
brought down from the montañas, singing
dangling heavy ears like wide, wet
blackhaired bells crying out across two roads:
one, a horse called Home.
The other, scarred back bucking in the wind.
Lessons en Lengua
BY MARY ROBLES
Que seco (how dry), the land.
Que reina (how queen), the butterfly. Que chula
(how cute) her crown in the canyon,
her body (que misteriosa) on the tigerbacked
rocks. Piedras de tigre, stone or rock
of the tiger. Mountains of stripe, barrels
of cactus, their pads bearing pink fruits
(opuntias), that my aunts broke open
to paint on their lips. Que feas, dijo
my great-grandmother, her face
a great piedra of stone
as she scowled. It’s as though
they’ve sucked on las tunas (opuntias)
or fruits-of-the-prickly-pear,
it’s as though they wove tattered
wands of the waving ocotillos
through their graying hair. Don’t they want
to be chula, don’t they want to be
canyon, not seco (the land),
breaking open and lifting her dry gown
to her wet eyes, in pain, in dried-up despair?
Drifter Sequence
BY MARY ROBLES
Seventh anniversary of your death, and nothing to say except: the back of my neck,
with my hair in a bun, is a pool of yellowed milk. Yes, I’m asleep.
*
I wore a wedding dress to bed. All night, the doves
bobbing necks in the moonlight drowned in light of the onion. Seven years, tonta.
Seven corridas cut like Suki’s rope at the pachangas. Nothing to cure the prickling
on my back.
*
How you danced with my grandmother in the candles glimmering on & off in the backyard,
how you ran my passion to the ground. I could never have been beautiful
while you were alive, your rheumy eye dormant, asleep, afraid of a woman’s shadow,
the long hair of shadow.
Afraid to speak Spanish, my sleep afraid in Spanish, a coma of horses.
*
I went to the Socorro graveyard, sick with sexualisma. I spoke my secrets to the dry canyon
beggar, the cockroach. He ran away with your death date held up in his crooked thighs.
*
All night my brother whimpered your name. Dragged a limp bag of cigarillos & pepitas
to your grave and grew the rags of an old woman, like stains on his face. Like you threw him away, like his sick man who needled his arms.
*
When asked about you, smoke comes out my mouth.
When asked about you, I smoke a big cigar infused with cherry alcohol.
My boot, full of your foot.
*
This cello, just my body tempting you to return and touch me. This drunkenness,
just you teaching me to keep myself in suspension, to be like a butterfly in tequila.
