Culture war collateral damage:
Mexican-American gang member from nowhere
northern California, released from prison
to San Francisco half-way house
sketches her;
long-gone from nowhere northern Texas,
you can take the boy from the country
but some of the country stays in the boy
from divorced smashed-atom
whitebread nuclear family
connects one or two of my dots
Watching that black hair twitch to the rhythm of her
take me as I am or eff off walking body language
was an education in the school of desire
and long odds;
one day, walking through the Goodwill warehouse
after a break, she said “Stop not talking to me or
I’m gonna throw a candy bar at you!”
I was glad she wasn’t tempted by the
heavier things surrounding us
The warehouse was a video game:
avoid the forklift and the man pushing
thAe palletjack,
what comes in always goes out in a
daily dance of muscle and fossil fuels;
detour, detour, all Goodwill’s children
must detour
We sniffed the edges of heterosexuality,
but it didn’t fit as well as we wanted it to;
age, culture, maybe class differences too—
well, shall we say that enough
hard-core gangsta rap
and bloody violent movies
can make me feel
like Samson with short hair
One day at a time actually meant something to me,
until she got fired and vanished like a fantasy
Mind and love are things of the spirit, unclassifiable
Area 51 UFOs,
or microvoltages of electricity and feel-good
kickapoo joy-juice brewed by the brain whenever
we connect, hug, kiss, whatever:
my nowhere northern cali girl was gone and
I finally understand what cold turkey really means
More about us: she was and is three gang-banger brothers,
drug addict, single mother, fragile grandmother, aunt
and mother raising her daughter, loves
Jimmy Santiago Baca; I met the woman she fell for
at the half-way house once, my gang-banger girl’s
eye for female flesh and spirit is pretty good
I’m a child of divorce, the sister I’ve seen once in 20 years
married three times, father remarried once, mother
never remarried, I haven’t hitched yet;
I almost had a Black step-father and brother,
but nowhere northern Texas would have
punished that crime
I borrowed a 6-foot-tall sister named Debra,
too well acquainted with 2004 drive-by death;
one day I said, “Sometimes you look like
a wolf prowling your territory in the warehouse”
after I asked her opinion on the chasing of younger
trying-to-be-ex-gang-banger women,
the word “fag” vanished from her vocabulary
From client of Goodwill to employee was a twisty
roller coaster ride, addiction to Debra and the
Filipino women, younger and older, seemed
going-going-gone; I was mood-swinging in the
tree-tops, thinking cold turkey might just
be my middle name
I said to one of the Filipino women, “If I ever
learn to speak Tagalog it will be your fault,
you make it sound so much fun to talk like that”
Give me I’ve-seen-it-all-and-it-can’t-hurt-me,
strange sense of humor, stainless steel much less
than 6 degrees of connection to large extended family,
I might run for the hills or get a grip
and ride that tiger—
I don’t think he’ll bite
His name was Celso Cabanero, classic 70 year old
tough old Filipino man, smoked too much, went from
hospital to retirement to dead after we worked together
for over a year;
my own maternal grandfather’s death
bothered me far less than Celso’s;
asking the supervisor about him didn’t get results,
retirement means gone means learning the truth
from a random work conversation
Management knows all about love and paychecks,
sexual harassment, the bottom line,
they talk about some of that in new client,
new employee orientation classes;
loving your co-workers,
losing them
and the desire to be part of the Non-Profit
Industrial Complex—the employee handbook
doesn’t cover that