Tijuana Book of the Dead Read online

  Copyright © 2015 Luis Alberto Urrea

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Is Available

  ISBN 978-1-61902-482-3

  Cover design by Jeff Clark

  Interior Design by E. J. Strongin, Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.

  Soft Skull Press

  An Imprint of COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.softskull.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 3 2 1

  e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-515-8

  For these children we have spit on. May they rise.

  I am trying to say beloved.

  I am trying to keep my baskets from spilling.

  I am trying to keep my necklaces on.

  I am saying I know this story.

  I am saying I know these people.

  I am calling beloved the curves of my mother’s arch.

  I am calling blessed the arcs of blood.

  I am saying this story is not about to end.

  —Darrell Bourque

  Burnt Water Suite

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  EXORDIUM

  You Who Seek Grace from a Distracted God

  CE

  Listen

  Valley of the Palms

  Codex Luna

  Siege Communiqué

  Arizona Lamentation

  Sombra

  Typewriter

  Skunks

  Fall Rain

  Irrigation Canal Codex

  Help Me

  Walking Backward in the Dark

  Roadmaster ’56

  Poema

  Tecolote Canyon

  OME

  48 Roadsongs

  Sonoran Desert Sutras

  YEI

  Teocalli Blues

  Ditch Turtles

  The Duck

  Elk

  La cara perdida

  There Is a Town in Mexico

  Song of Praise

  Love Song

  Definition

  Bravo 88

  Codex ColibrÍ

  The Signal-to-Noise Ratio: Chicago Haiku

  (asshole)

  Incident Report

  Canción al final de un día de sombras

  Lines for Neruda

  Pinche Ernesto

  Tijuana Codex

  The Tijuana Book of the Dead

  NAHUI

  Insomnia Machine

  16 Lane

  Darling Phyl

  HYMN

  Hymn to Vatos Who Will Never Be in a Poem

  EXORDIUM

  You Who Seek Grace from a Distracted God

  You, who seek grace from a distracted God,

  you, who parse the rhetoric of empire, who know

  in your guts what it is but don’t know what to call it,

  you, good son of a race of shadows—

  your great fortune is to have a job,

  never ate government cheese,

  federal peanut butter—

  you, jerked to light from secret dreams under your sheets,

  forgotten by 5:15

  false dawn—

  you, who sleep where you fall, sleep

  beside women not yours who keep you warm, sleep

  in spare rooms of your brothers, sleep in the old

  bed in the back of your mother’s house, sleep

  where you are closest to a bus line—

  you, who can’t believe your Ma rose at 4:45

  to fry one huevo and a slice of bologna

  laid on corn tortilla—border benedict—

  here’s your chance to drag home

  $80 a week, for her electric. Food.

  What’s left you spend on used paperbacks,

  a matinee, amigos, bus fare—

  pay the ticket back to work.

  You kneel in Ma’s broken tub now, no shower—

  no heat—plastic tarp over crumbled wall—gonna fix that

  for reals—one day—soon—no shampoo? Shit! Scrub

  your scalp with dish soap. Shiver. 5:35. Hop-to:

  got a mile to hustle to the express stop.

  You, who have no car, rush past house windows bright

  behind driveway Cadillacs—

  neighbors you never speak to stir

  their money in golden pots for all you know,

  heat turned high, showers running—

  and up boyhood’s hill you biked down

  all those gone years ago, head alight with high school hopes—

  the poetry of Becky’s eyes, Colette’s laughter,

  Li’l Mousie’s big black avalanche of hair, letters

  in your back pocket from someone else’s sweetheart—

  walk on blood

  stains brown now where the duplex bully crashed

  his stolen dirt bike into a trailer hitch last month and left

  teeth your homeboys counted in the street.

  You, who have Echo & the Bunnymen hair

  go. Go. Hike fast, man—

  it’s 5:45.

  And you long to sleep beside a woman you cannot

  possibly love.

  You reach the bench by 6:00. Still dark, but

  far mountains flame

  in orange light coming on—around you,

  coughing angels smoke, Guadalupes whisper—

  maids in sweaters, men in workboots and Levi’s

  watching for the 50 to come, watching the clock,

  working for kids, for families for parents, and

  already the blubbery radio pharisee vomits rerun clots

  of fetid blood upon their heads,

  these calloused children,

  these mothers,

  these illegals, these fucking greasers, these wetbacks,

  these narcos, these gang-related Hispanics, these beaners,

  these pepper-bellies, these spics, these taco-benders,

  these Aztecs,

  these welfare cheaters, these Social Security chiselers,

  these savages, these gitanos, these illiterate diseased job

  stealing unassimilating

  anchor baby makers, these Papists, these terrorists,

  these aliens—

  someone laughs, so do you, all together now. Bus comes,

  gasps, doors unfold like aluminum scorpion jaws—oh Christ

  everybody there just dug panicked between couch pillows

  for enough coins to pay the fare—

  one more late day and you’re all fired

  and some of you wept while digging.

  Praying the invisible man’s psalm;

  ay, por favor, por favor, por favor—

  doors chew closed. You’re in.

  You drop downhill toward black water and veer

  south to the sleeping city—bays and harbors full of oil

  don’t invite any one of you to swim.

  Bus transfers in grim fists

  worried and twisted—busmen catching more buses, riders

  catching red

  trolleys to get to jobs nobody wanted but everyone

  needed, catching hell from asshole foremen who have never

  read a single poem and never will—gardeners

  nails soiled black, they’re sleeping now, harrowing small

  hedgerow
s

  of last dreams, mouths open, men and women borrowing

  more seconds

  of home, of Spanish, of brown nipples, of grandparents, of

  mangos

  and bailes de primavera, of days before heavy work boots or

  maid shoes,

  days of never ending nothing, O Elohim,

  old days they swayed like alamos in breezes, days before headless

  men were left in the topaz dawn in the pueblo’s plaza, before

  the desert women

  were left dismantled for buzzards in the praderas, before the

  exodus. And you,

  who cannot sleep, bless these great unseen,

  stare at the world made of Alka-Seltzer,

  fizzing away in the light. Still.

  You pull the cord.

  7:00.

  Same old dntn street. Same day every day, unchanged.

  You blink on Avenue C—fog

  disembarks at the docks,

  follows sailors drunk and whoring before breakfast

  down Broadway. Strange days. Echoes flee the county jail cold

  beside you:

  voices: hymns of rage: inmate and trustee, some of them

  your cousins,

  sing matins, night’s vigils over: offer hosannas of longing:

  Patri et Filio:

  in tedium you walk silent, counting your manifold sins,

  to the plaza, stand

  in the crush of your family—these children heading for

  trade school,

  the wheelchair man, the woman and her shopping cart,

  the nodding hooker with blue tears on her cheek, paisanos

  y borrachos, Ticos, Boricuas, Xicanos, Apaches,

  Tainos, Habaneras, cariocas, Mayas,

  tattooed cholo Samurai’d and inscrutable leaning back,

  hushed as he watches

  you. And you want to, you

  really want to, you are bursting with it, you

  are burning with it, you

  who have no words

  want to cup their cheeks in your hands,

  you want to hold their faces between your palms,

  you want to say it—say it, you have nothing

  to lose—say it: say

  I love you. I love you.

  I love you. I love you.

  I love you. I love you.

  I love you.

  CE

  Listen

  listen

  carnales, listen

  listen with sympathy

  listen with the purity of death

  the pliance of swampwater soft

  in heat and gator patience

  listen like a mountain

  listen like saguaros listening

  to cactus wrens, coyotes, night

  owl: listen like the owl

  listen like the owl’s prey

  jittery in rocks beneath bighorn’s

  clocking feet: listen to the clock

  listen to time, listen

  to rattler’s warning maracas

  listen, like the culebra, with

  your tongues:

  listen like rocks

  listening to snow

  hear it: hear it, mi gente, all

  of it—hear the hate when it splashes,

  the love when it weeps

  listen to the rail lines ringing

  listen to the cymbal sizzle of weeds,

  the grito of wind

  cutting around locked gates, palomas,

  rummy wino’s holy Halsted cough

  listen

  carnales listen

  to the hymn of it, the lie of it, the

  prayer of it, the voices

  singing our names: listen

  it’s our story, it’s our song,

  you’ve got to hear it—

  listen.

  Valley of the Palms

  When people tell me their problems, I think

  of María: wasn’t every girl named María

  in Mexico then? But this one lived

  for a time in a high-desert rancho in Valle

  de Las Palmas, a place of cattle, thin horses,

  scorpions, baby owls in cages, rattlesnakes caught

  by the orphan boys who slept locked in pens

  so they couldn’t sneak out and raid the beds

  of girls locked in their own pens ten feet

  from the boys.

  If a fire ever came through . . . but God

  was merciful. Was he not?

  No fires. Just orphans. Just work. Just fried pork skins

  and indigenous gods washed out of the hills in floods: fat

  bellied women crouching with jaguar screams on their faces

  carved in the local gray stone. Just missionaries

  making popcorn and bringing thrown-out clothes.

  The endless uproar of orphans.

  The voices like high tide of laughter and insults

  rewetting this upthrust seabed.

  Evening cowbells’ rusted clank.

  And María.

  Never smiling. María.

  Off to the side. María.

  María who took my hand to walk with me but

  would not look at me. María

  six years old. Scabby knees. Orphanage smell of smoke and pee.

  Somber as a queen in that scorched orange sunset in her valley

  on her rancho with her strangers.

  María.

  And I asked.

  I had to ask. I always asked—the writer

  needed to know

  the secrets of the valley. Looking for notes, looking

  for stories. I asked

  Why is María so serious?

  Why does María not laugh or play?

  Why does María not smile?

  And the adults with the keys

  stared at the dirt as if soil might offer

  redemption. Well,

  • • •

  María had a father once.

  He worked in bad cantinas in Tijuana, Mexicali,

  those places we dare not go

  where the men who have seen everything drink,

  and the music is so loud you cannot hear

  crying. And her father

  took her from bar to bar, where he put her to work.

  He worked her hard where the women make love

  to animals. Her father made love to her

  onstage for money and her father took money

  from sicarios to make love to her too

  every night after night

  every night.

  Every night, María

  cries in her bed and she does not smile

  in the day and she does not play

  because she does not remember how to do

  any of these things.

  It was spring. The little yellow flowers exploded like rockets.

  Every wind smelled of cows and horses and gardens and shit:

  dust lifted like smoke from the roads.

  We sat on a wall, watching the world burn.

  She twisted my fingers. “María,” I said.

  “Do you want me to pick you some flowers?”

  Dusk came raining on us, purpled the valley. No water

  in the riverbed, just a buried rusted blue Ford. Crows like

  black glitter

  fell upon the trees.

  And María

  said, “It will be dark soon.”

  Boys shuffled home behind clanking old cows

  prodding them with sticks.

  “Do you love me?”

  We did not look at each other.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Say it.”

  “I love you, María.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Then

  you may give me

  many

  many

  flowers.”

  Codex Luna

  My moon pulled a different darkness across the sky.r />
  My unknown sisters tucked in the barbed embrace of

  the border fence saw a different face in the moon. Theirs

  was a Luna Tochtli, a Rabbit Moon—moon of running,

  fear, hiding.

  My bed was soft. Their beds were stone. My moon

  was origami floating in a water cup, a Japanese

  artwork of ricepaper and pearls. A light to dream of

  girlfriends. Their moon peeled a panicked eye, goggled

  blind as they ran. Headlights froze them, twin moonbeams

  ran them down, tufts of their dreams tangled in thickets

  of border tumbleweeds.

  My sisters brought undocumented scents to sweeten

  the valleys. Their perfume settled on roadsides, misted

  over bloodstain, rattlesnake, bootprint, guard dog, flash

  light: illegal exhalations, unlawful breathing tainted

  with cinnamon, coffee, filling cries like sugar in the bellies

  of honeysuckle. Underarm sweat from running. Belly

  sweat. Back of the neck sweat. Small of the back sweat.

  Shoulderblade sweat. Brow sweat. Behind them, hunger.

  Before them, night. Thigh sweat. Tang of terror under their

  skirts, smell of hope burning like mustard blossoms in

  the caves. Burning stink of running, Death smells of

  squatting where they hoped no one could see them.

  Fertilizer. Lemons.

  Black soap fresh hair flagged in the wire.

  Sun smell of underpants once hung in the wind. Heavy