Читать книгу Hustle - David Tomas Martinez - Страница 11

4.

When ice cream was

the only bribe needed

to tell my grandmother

my cousins walked

the canyons to meet

with their boyfriends,

I should have asked

for a soda, too.

When I leaned against a fence,

playing with a chicken bone

breaking with cracks from the sun,

when only me and a recliner’s bones

or the bleached skull of a plastic bag

could be seen, I could’ve

panted in some heat, too.

At nine, I had no language for lonely,

but could watch cars swim laps forever.

The fence shared a common tongue,

but had no place to go,

if it no longer liked where

it lived, could not move

to my neighborhood,

where we were

racist neighbors,

suspicious of strange fences,

where cars piled in our dirt yard,

and no one listened to the pink

seat of a swing as it licked

the ground with only one chain.