Tijuana Book of the Dead
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.
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