Night Shift
BY MARTHA PAZ-SOLDAN
At a Googie motel off Route 50,
you don’t ask questions when a man
checks out with a box dye job,
no luggage in sight. This far into the desert,
every bird is a vulture, every repairman
has a tattoo of his girl’s face.
You steel your nerve to look
past the pool of light under the VACANCY
sign and catch the outline
of an animal digging something up.
In the distance, a souvenir shop sign
flickers on and off. You watch
until it starts to look like Morse code
from one outpost to another. If this were a Western,
you’d draw the .42 under the front desk,
cut through the Nevada dark toward
the abandoned sedan sitting in the buffelgrass.
Across state lines, you’d eat
your weight in diner food, lose a bet
at the horserace, lose a finger. You’d turn
a year older without even noticing,
having married for money and lost track of time.
A call-in talk show host levels with you on the radio,
Huevona, you never even had a chance.
Mano a Mano
BY MARTHA PAZ-SOLDAN
I am watching through my fingers
as my dad tries to haggle down a bedframe
at the furniture store.
Some call this charm, I call it
shadowboxing. I call it some poor salesgirl
stepping out for a smoke
while he carries the box to the car
like a prize fish. Where he’s from,
this is how you get by:
one good deal after another,
two fake teeth for the price of one.
Some things skip a generation.
When I cry my way down half a speeding
ticket, he says, You could do better than that,
but that’s the track star in him,
gold chain between his lips
to keep it from swinging, who,
on his best days,
will still leave something clouded
in dirt. My father, standing in the clearance
aisle, says Hija mia
before showing me what he wants
but doesn’t need, hoping for something
like the hole in his calf, two fingers
wide, where the stray bullet came through
a kitchen window and bounced off the muscle—
that good of a bargain.
