ABSTRACT

AN OX ON FIRE

Many of these poems begin as a stream of conscious writing, allowing for the emotional and visceral moments to be the first movement toward a poem. Once this preliminary work is done I will allow for a day or two to lapse in order to reroute my efforts towards form and structure, discovering perhaps what the poem decides what it wants to be. This manuscript is made up of the last eight years of writing, as an undergraduate and a grad student. The beginning of this manuscript consists of mostly family narratives and ekphrastics, based off of old family photographs that I handled and meditated on. Other works are dream poems, which I found useful in exploring major themes of love, loss and death. Later works of this collection are inspired by loved ones, come and gone, with a gaze towards reconciliation, sublimation and a need for order.

Victor Arnoldo Perez May 2015

AN OX ON FIRE

by Victor Arnoldo Perez

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in the College of Arts and Humanities California State University, Fresno May 2015

APPROVED

For the Department of English:

We, the undersigned, certify that the thesis of the following student meets the required standards of scholarship, format, and style of the university and the student's graduate degree program for the awarding of the master's degree.

Victor Arnoldo Perez Thesis Author

Tim Skeen (Chair) English

Corrinne Hales English

John Beynon English

For the University Graduate Committee:

Dean, Division of Graduate Studies

AUTHORIZATION FOR REPRODUCTION OF MASTER'S THESIS

I grant permission for the reproduction of this thesis in part or in its entirety without further authorization from me, on the condition that the person or agency requesting reproduction absorbs the cost and provides proper acknowledgment of authorship.

X Permission to reproduce this thesis in part or in its entirety must be obtained from me.

Signature of thesis writer:

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Cactus Heart: “Dream of Tió Bebo” appeared as “Tripping over a Cord” Echapbook: “Photograph of Nueva Rosita Mexico, 1953” appeared as Photograph of Mexico, 1953 Foothill: “In a Dive Bar near Delhi” Ram’s Tale: “The Fall”

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ONE ...... 1

The Fall ...... 2

January Cold ...... 3

Dream of Tio Bebo ...... 4

Maria’s Kitchen ...... 5

Photograph of Nueva Rosita, Mexico 1953 ...... 7

In a Dive Bar Near Delhi ...... 8

An Ox on Fire ...... 9

Photograph from Hume Lake 1968 ...... 12

Present Like Mosquito ...... 14

The Speed of a Backswimmer Nymph ...... 17

Uncle Javier as Chaperone ...... 18

Love Song for Baby Snowshoes ...... 19

Hunkered Down at the Woolfe’s Estate ...... 23

TWO ...... 25

Another Poem About Ants ...... 26

They Rise Like Giants ...... 27

Gallery Deer ...... 29

Gallery Etiquette ...... 30

Stay Strong Like Hemi ...... 31

First Kiss ...... 32

A Heart Shaped Uterus ...... 33 vi

Page

A Dream of Missing People ...... 34

THREE ...... 38

Mucho Means a Lot in Spanish ...... 39

A Man Wants My Children to Call Him Pops ...... 41

Dog Attack ...... 43

I Wore My Father’s Gloves ...... 44

The Story of the Cat and the Dog ...... 45

Navel to Apocalypse ...... 46

This Song ...... 47

ONE 2 2

The Fall

The soy and Tiger’s Milk will not save you here it is time for you to start thinking about what you left beyond the bones and blood and your reflection on your most recent past your evasion of reality your money your stop signs

I will not deny my complete failure that brought us together my bike my jousting with herds of steel buffaloes my presence I commanded on the sidewalk my full speed vulnerability my full speed break in the chain

But if you decide to fall turn your body into the fall do not try to outdo the inevitable that you will be on your back again staring into the sun Let this be

Like the inevitable phone call let this be a reminder that there are so many things to do still like lose your job and convince your love that you have lost your anger that you have lost your absence 3 3

January Cold

The tallest parts of Fresno drown in the cold of this night. The palm leaves quiver like tiny hands reaching out to somehow escape the cold. The backyard moon faceless, hides within its shadow again, revealing only its pock marked back, its disease. And on these nights when the clouds have scattered into the Sierra Nevada, the cold metastasizes frozen white onto the rooftops and cars. There are no harmonics to staying outside, but sometimes you can catch a jet rising in its trajectory southbound with a steady rumble streaming above, mocking the immobility, and stoic servitude of the ground. Yesterday I asked her to stay, and it is uncertain if she will return, perhaps after she has run her course. Even the sun has its predisposition for spoiling, mounted in its sliver of sky far towards the horizon. Fresno, like the old Chihuahua mother’s who don’t want to be held, coddled, that need only snap their teeth to make the stars recede. Maybe in a week this will all pass, but the cold hunkers down tonight, finally finds its bed among the streetlights, and parking lots, with a wind passing through like a violent dog, twisting, and scavenging finally trapped within the net of the trees.

4 4

Dream of Tio Bebo

Tripping over a cord the lamp crashes down, sending the few inside running for cover. Sleeping, I can still hear the rustling overhead, dwellers deep and digging in the sticky dampness of sleep, stocking within the black eyes of a skyscraper, heavy, against the darkness behind. So I rise. I rise with somnambulant wings, with eyes wide like stereo speakers, sifting through the sidewalk trees and street lamps. And I couldn’t help but think Tió Bebo, dead now for years, unshaven, with body and apron arched over the hum of machines. How can anything so mortally severed reunite again? And back under the florescent lights I could see Abuelito Galaviz, a man I never knew, but could imagine somehow, more like symbol, less like person, sitting alone on a small wooden stool steady with hands as big as boxing gloves. He spends his years trying to recall faces, shucking the insides of time pieces, tossing their tired shells onto the floor, flecks of gold spilling like light from his waist.

5 5

Maria’s Kitchen

My Grandmother says a desert can swallow a man whole, like a great open mouth with chapped lips turned towards the sky, with a long cactus tongue to pull you down. She says they would wait for him, sitting together framed by a small kitchen window behind the laundry line. Sometimes the only mementos from work are born from bars: perfume from a woman’s neck, papers for rolling tobacco, broken glass from alleyways hitched in the grooves of work boots.

Over ribbons and fabric, near the warmth of the kitchen oven she unravels her childhood memories. This is Nueva Rosita, without roses, where the women are waiting for the man of the house, waiting to take his pay into town. There is no precision to coming home, and the women have learned to be careful to undress him when he arrives, uncovering on most nights infestation: a black soot mask, feathers of dark earth from the foundry, furrowed into his clothing and hands. These are the days of thirst, una casita alumbrado con velas— a small home with a candle lit room closed windows— open doors. In the evening kitchen, I think of distance, places far from Sanger as she passes a lifetime of portraits from a shoe box. We abduct them, possess them with one palm, stack them neatly like postage stamps, remember them like feral spirits, like the white sheets passing overhead. Some of the images

6 6 are men, with rivets in skin, some with a proclivity for teetering along la tierra, spilling like milk. In the evening, Nueva Rosita is a portal where a door swings violently in the wind before becoming unhinged. Her memory is a bridge over stones, with a jagged danger waiting underneath.

7 7 Photograph of Nueva Rosita, Mexico 1953

My mother said this part of Mexico is like desert. The trees huddle at shore with thin skeleton arms, forever leaning, gasping. Her sepia eyes stare back at me, knowing no secrets to a world burnt, cauterized. Looking in, you recall your short hair, the thin spirit of your cabeza, the river brewing its steady commerce of hatred and someone’s popsicle stick home with windows that hang like the old eyes of a net, unbroken somehow.

This land is like a preparation before meals, before beaten black earth, before tired hands trembling in the steady breeze, before reconciliation, before soaking, before harvest, before gathering, before being diced and keyed up, searing in a pan.

And she in white cotton dress and curtsy, offering her blue flowers to the sky that has no intention, just the offering of manic marionette hands holding a spot light around her. And on this part of Nueva Rosita, the river will defecate on itself when the steady rain meats the dead pan revealing a small colony on the edge, an asylum for dank dolls dropped into the currents, a prayer made up of old rags and sacks, with steel pins in eyes rusted. There are so many people to hate on this side of the river. And their cactus bodies tell the tale, with porcupine feet to make him lame, make her stay, make it right again. A colony pillowed in between the wet earth gathered into my young mother’s hands. From underneath, some kind of evil, and uncontrollable writhing, a stone In the gravel of my mother’s heart. One more trip to California, and your almost there. The dead have buried their money there, somewhere under the homes to keep safe from the soldiers, and their ghosts never came. Sometimes they told you not to lift rocks, to beware of the stage under boulder, a playground for bewitched snakes and scorpions. Stay close to the home, and you did. 8 8

In a Dive Bar Near Delhi

I would like to imagine that it started with a sound, like cigarettes being packed against a palm —or maybe it was the beat of the juke box, hypnotic, reaching its great tendril arms onto the highway. Some song that kept the engine turning inside, but still faint enough to be unfamiliar. I didn’t know what it was to miss home yet, so along highway 99 on the way to Fresno, slowly dipping back into the valley, I would fall into these spaces, like an errant ant falling into the den of a trap door spider. Within the diffused light, Tim the bartender stood, watching like a front row spectator, steady behind the gates as the bulls reeled themselves in. Once said that he earned this job the old fashioned way, nepotism, then chuckled and reposted himself steady against the hardwood laid down by his father. And in the late summer I would find him there, perfect in front of the electric altar of glowing glass, with salvation drifting out beyond the red double doors. From the travels I was taken in by the cordials the thickness that tucked me back from the brilliance of the day. And at two in the afternoon when the light breeches the doorway igniting the patrons inside you might find a couple of stools aflame, Henry and Rene lost in two step, lovely with eyes closed, gripping tighter and tighter like children lost in fire. These are the days when a little smoke couldn't hurt anyone, especially Tim, short in stature, but always a giant torturing the mini city of bottles for a cure. I’m many miles away from home still, hunkered down in a dive bar near Delhi sacrificing the sun for gripping glass like a pistol against my lips. I suppose life's got a couple of more turns before I can start again, so I stroke the stag head mounted in a position forever north and for once, and maybe never again, hone our sonorous high notes, contemplate where we have been, witness the distance appear lost and somehow eternal. Home, somewhere beyond the fake wood paneling and the many voices that scatter like thin clouds overhead. Maybe I should stop in at a dive bar near Delhi, to watch the June bugs loitering underneath, to toss peanut shells as steady and as sure as the tide of cars gliding their great sails through the top of Stevens Street.

9 9

An Ox on Fire

And the neighbors couldn’t tell what exactly had happened that night when the music began running louder in the apartment overhead.

A bystander had reported a rise in room temperature of more than ten degrees. And Angelina his girlfriend who has since gone missing once recounted a presence that had entered, not an elephant this time, sitting in bewilderment, nor fox in its scurried flight under chair, nor caterpillar present and forgiving. This is something much heavier, and not easily packaged, labeled.

This “thing” that changes when the soul gets caught off guard. They say this “thing” that can’t be packed inside a suitcase

This “thing” that you made when you started drinking years ago. They say it started with a flash of light coming from an upstairs window, pouring onto an adjacent tree with a grumble and steaming, like a caldron. They say these types of myths change in form first, then in degrees.

To witness a man mutate into an animal form, an ox on fire, starting in a pan of his own disillusionment while experiencing a bottle.

And soon enough he learned to cope with so many changes. The children under another man’s roof, and he took to devouring their photographs as if the memory had somehow become palatable. They say the transformation sparked from a phone call that was made that afternoon.

Never to be answered, but he continued to call anyway, to recover what he had already missed, 12 Christmas and the 5 birthday celebrations lost during mediation, 15 Halloween masks and every Fourth of July Celebration, 50 trips of planned kayaking at the coast, 100 experiments gone wrong, that had in fact never taken place. This “thing” you do, a thousand mornings he might have awakened to children in laughter, but this was his 10 10 weekend with the children, and she won’t answer the phone. They resort to a world of parking lots and rest stops instead, taking on the guests, the modern pastoral. The new era of places to pass children along, and nothing is a given, no prayer or paper amongst the folded arms and adult silence. She never did come that weekend and his score card read “zero,” and zero equals this anger. There is an immediate siege, a response in air rushing like vacuum into a violent void of misunderstanding. A trudging and deliberate trajectory; this is this “thing” not an accident. And accounts of the damages come in daily, starting from the early summer of 2010. They say his head grew massive barely able to fit through the narrow halls of his home; his ox horns scrape away plaster long divots at his sides like from a plow, and the blue light and sirens create shock waves into the soul, pulsating around him where an emergency is happening. Try not to be consumed caught off guard if you should ever come this way. He escaped his confines through a series of screen doors and screeching. His escape an immediate and unexpected terror. It was suggested to him to play a sad song into her answering machine to induce some type of communication or trance like truce, a response to dissolving. His girlfriend watches from the corner like a ring announcer again:

Let’s get ready to rumble! Weighing in at 205 pounds of Mexican mayhem, of pure yoke and nerve, 250 bottles of tequila and unmeasurable lapses in indiscretion, one torn meniscus, still torn, and a shoulder off kilter. By way of Fresno, California, Victor Arnoldo is—An Ox on Fire!

His nearest opponent never has a face though and he wishes her well tonight despite the fact that the check is in the mail. A return address is a location that is still left unseen, a place of legend marked off with yellow tape before entering underworlds and those entrances that we might try to forget with time. The return address use to be a yard where an man once tried to mediate a pressure before leaping into action. An ox, but part man, a hybrid beast tethered to a weight that is

11 11 only an extension of his presence and his inability to move towards reconciling his terror. At first the shadow of his fist grows wide and breaks open; the birds leave the scene He begins to collapse into the dusk, no enemy, just anger as the colors grow faint within the shadow of arms that become legs now.

He is an ox on fire, a transformation into a staggering beast, an evolution of the soul through flint and fight, a straight and steady passage. A pulling, an inside job with no opponent insight, just the disgusting overflow of time wasted and waiting. A father standing at the edge of his visage looking carefully through, rasping his horns, never to be used but still gliding them against the evening Sycamore. Part one entails disconnecting these old wares, what it once was to be human. To hold a child’s ball and dream of child’s laughter. To find a place to enter by examining the surface. He launches the ball into night, a kick to remove the infection. An orb lifting off high above this part of the cityscape, like a flare into the distance, arching one last time before puncturing the sky.

12 12

Photograph from Hume Lake 1968

A photograph The young couple leaning A two-toned 1954 Dodge Royal resting A record to launch the century ahead

He purchased the old Dodge for eight hundred dollars while working at the service station in the same small town he met my mother, the Mexican flower. Who could ever share her stage?

--her spotlight, her performance against a mountain, and rise against the shifting weather?

Years later, the car became an emblem of mine, the shadow of starship, a place for us to hide behind in our grandparents’ yard next to the husk of a my father’s boat, a skeleton in my memory now, but sitting heavy like a steel buffalo frozen into my mind. I imagined it like a monument but it disappeared years ago they say. I can’t remember exactly what was said, but know that he was eighteen, turns his own wrenches, turns the wheel turns his hands over the curves of her body in 1968. A piano solo to take her off the page, losing rhythm, inertia to send them out of this town the first chance they got. He could have kept driving; she could have held his hand a little tighter, reaching out with her arms, like the thin branches of the ocotillo cactus. Puncture the skin is what I might have said; she might have then sensed the trembling 13 13 underneath. Even Uncle Javier was of no service, the younger brother chaperone on the backseat, with eyes like a chrome cluster staring back, mute to cumulative shift in the weather, but with needles tearing through the numbers of his register.

14 14

Present Like Mosquito

And I did eventually have the dream about the legend, an old folk tale of lovers and mosquitos everywhere. A feast of blood and emaciated bodies in the sweet San Joaquin sun. They were picking raisins the two. She could have been anyone’s Mexican flower, a sacred red wine mistakenly discarded onto the streets of Sanger. She was the carefully mended hem of what was once a frayed skirt.

He is the old flannel, ready to unhinge the sack, tracing the curves of her body through the vineyards of the central valley in 1968.

That is all over now. They once returned to me, the odd couple in an old photograph that has now gone missing.

He is the flannelled top and the entire silent breathe of the High Sierra Mountain Range. So young then-- never asking

What it was that he had found? In other pictures a tired loop shirt, with short sleeves and khakis, permanent against her yellowed dress just past her knees. 15 15

She was Irma, ready to run and ignite the world in colors. Those days are gone now. I’ve come to learn that there is a uniform for everything. He was Joe, my father and he wore the old levis to climb the telephone poles and search the midday. It was my dream and a dream can lose a decade in real time, ten years in a moment.

And the people missing in the dream are sometimes missing in real life. She later hunkered down in a small suburb of Visalia, of forgotten old people, veterans, refugees, others like us: tortilla flinging rascals between the fields and enclosing city. This is about a bridge collapsing behind them in those afternoons where even in our brightest moments where the world could appear whole, could disappear within a fissure of a ground awakening, a crack after the flood between them. She taught us to be wrathful in a personalized poverty passed down from centuries.

This passage stored and these secrets stored in a shopping cart at rest in a dirty canal. Silence ensues before the performance, before launching, a message seeming

16 16 to dwell from underneath. Evidence of exile, our ancestral DNA always kept through images and dreams that become legend. A sounding muffled by the wake of a boat passing and a burbling that climbs passing through this unholy subterfuge. My lathery graveyard, my black and mossy encryption, never breaking the surface of 1968, but ringing again like a siren above every central valley roof top still.

She is an overpass seeming to connect the parts, allowing for flow Yes, I still remember the car, molten metal and Mopar, standing in attention, rusting in my grandparents backyard.

17 17 The Speed of a Backswimmer Nymph

I can’t remember exactly what was said, but I remember just that my uncle Javier had taken the picture, and how skinny they all appeared. I might have warned them at shore, before departing into the decade ahead. And it’s ok if the Mexican flower fails to communicate her haste, through her white pencil arms, through the suffocating shadow of my father’s skeleton arch.

She could have gone anywhere, but she didn’t learn to drive until she was almost ready for a divorce. She could have been taken by any man, and any man will do once you learn to hate your own father. She could have smoked Salems and pot behind the back stop, and I might recall the cactus plant again, the arms like spider legs that could pull the skin off of any man’s gloved hand, knowing that her mind was the only thing she owned. She could been anywhere by now, but she’s here at the kitchen table, with a picture of a man, my father that she has hated for years. Not all goes away with time, and keep close attention She must have seen some kind of promise in his shorts, gifted white polyester shorts, with the life of eternity, thinking any man who can scramble for all he is worth chasing an endless yellow ball in a wired cage on green cement, in central Valley heat, can do anything, but that was years ago, coming from a girl who had almost nothing, who had only learned to give it all away. And he could have gone anywhere, but he is here, like 1968 somehow, like the backswimmer nymph awakening over the deepest recesses of a dam, like the mosquitoes at shore amassing its stockade of swelling, like crushed leaves around us, like the mystery of history finally breaking the surface like pictures scattered on the white table cloth the root of an old myth unearthed but just a tale and speed of new beginnings up at Hume Lake. 18 18

Uncle Javier as Chaperone

Not even he could warn of impending fate, a storm up ahead, out of sight, with the chill of the long Sierra Nevada, pine capturing the air. Not even he could see beyond the trees outlining the lake.

I imagined it was a wonderful day, a great sail catching an opaque that all people want, filled with mountain breath, captivating the shore with its wake. In the distance there is sound, a storm brewing, a boycott, a warning to the sounds of a legacy collapsing an inevitable collapse from beneath its own subterfuge. A ceremony from where the thurible rises and then swings above the silent omnibus of breath, beyond the cathedral steps of St Mary’s after being gilded and then set to glide into blissful delight, and then into unforeseen terror. Some kind of future pulverizing the thin skin of water, sheering off into the thickness soon to unfold. I could imagine they stayed for a while, and how lame, staring into the lake now, with future somewhere underneath, a hidden history—yes, still writhing , ready to unfold like a promise from long ago, like an insemination with tears, dusty floor, corrugated night, framed by a silhouette of forest against the enclosing sky.

19 19

Love Song for Baby Snowshoes

I can still hear the shrill of street corners where you fell like sand from my palms dissipating out into the ether. I dreamt of your flight ever since, your soft voice coming to me over midnight roof tops--

What were you trying to say to me?

Suddenly again, you are gone, and I commence into the city of sleep a one-man brigade to bring you home. And it is still a little unclear as to where home is. And I’m at it again one foot at the front to step on every crack, from the rooftop bars, to the sifting of shores. How is it that our love has become a beach comber’s delight? We were prone to tangle, and nothing seems to tether you in a dream. Your flight under faded umbrellas I don’t know if you understand, you have meant the world to me. And I carried on, frozen in sleep and struggling under the weighted night, pushing and pummeling over boxes, a siege on the marketplace below, and your silvery tale unreachable. I made a wreckage of their canopies

20 20 to pursue a last kiss goodnight. But I return to your flower beds, your secret gardens with my wandering finger tips that fondled the furniture in somnambulance to uncovered the paired bulbs and imagined the lavender breasts of your chrysanthemums. I breathe in their bouquets with outstretched arms, searching deep within their cobwebbed stems left by your morning spiders.

I cradled your image through the unraveled empty hearted ragdolls, stroking your impulses into submission to hear one last screech against the day, to hear your violent tale of being handled and forgotten.

Return to your toy box castle, you dark place where you lay starving for a sliver of the day. But, no answers tonight, no answers tonight. So I carry on to anger the peddlers again, my puppetry, my rising arms holding the mouths agape a stage of strings from the torn cloth the last sail falling, homage to the drowning schooner, holding onto one last breath.

Another ripened fruit in the basket tonight And a gaze to spilt and spoil the bunch. My angry hand, my mighty hold, and the cold steel that will inevitably split the skin. Forage through ice, pull the long tails of lobsters that will never feed again, 21 21 pluck on the strings of guilty guitars and spin the wheels of stolen bicycles if that is what you must do. Her song is an unrecognizable melody through the throat of a rusted flute. Our passage is a trail with my blood A trail of the heart hypnotic and fading A trail of empty oysters shells that will only bring me to be poisoned from the sea that dreams of mercury tonight; another trail of absence and I don’t know if you get it, I miss you. Tonight the heart becomes balcony a predestined ancient loneliness, reverberating like a rising requiem unspoken. Tonight’s dream a subway sickness caused by the absence of your intoxicating fauna. Send a prayer, release me from your silken capture, Send a prayer, the netting and sting of your stiletto the slippage-- a fish uncaught, my thoughts unwound but gathering like bath water somehow. Send a prayer a gathering warmth in my mouth plummeting onto the trees of my tongue. This portal of early morning dreamscapes that only you can see. To think that I could find you transformed again an exotic black mushroom of the forest

22 22 to be put on display in jars to ingest every moment, to see the day split into sawdust and taken in by the granule. To find you like a prize, atop a shelf

To preserve you amongst the dusty accolades of a prize fighter’s purple ribbons and glass. To find you like a pair of baby snowshoes, a pair of baby snowshoes floating light against the rising water.

I made room for You! --and made room for the inevitable tonight; another dream would turn you into lark, another flume suspended in the sun stricken sky another world of waterfalls folding into book another moment turning dark, you send me out bartering again.

To set me back into a symphony of street cars and empty signage warranting no direction leaving only the skipping ellipses of memory of your fading porcelain, your grasp falling. You were never careful.

23 23

Hunkered Down at the Woolfe’s Estate

She rented the old mother-in-law quarters behind the Woolfe’s estate a mile up Van Ness Avenue. We spent the evenings together. A restaurant girl who watched me place orders as she filled herself with happy hours and midnight parties on Tuesdays. Over time I became her guest, where we would return past the busted gate, preparing to saw each other in half; like two blades taking turns, until my bad knee succumbed to slippage like the broken fork of a bicycle, torn saddle, no chain this time. She says I’m a gypsy, and then calls me babe. And In the late hours of her bedroom, I’m her gypsy, temporarily stooped down in her rented boudoir on the Woolfe’s estate. Where lawn stretches out long between our quarters. In early October it is filled with subserviced summer bicycles, sulking in the shadows with errant rabbits scrambling along its hedges. In the morning Maura and the Woolfe’s are off to work, much earlier than I’m use to waking, with the light and glow from the French doors erupting and reaching onto our sheets, breeching our borders. The air is thin, smoky and filled with echoes of late night giggles, as I fish through half empty beer bottles still lingering in her bedroom. In a month, I could be anywhere, but here I vacation Fresno, displaced amongst the gardeners, and barrage of their instruments, early along Old Fig Garden after having sawed through the oak of her body, 24 24 forging new bones through the night. Tonight, somewhere through the open lattice, through the naked arm of a tree limb, peak inside; watch as the steam rises steadily up the walls of our shelter, our republican bathhouse, no evidence, just sticky as warm honey Of western mysticism, crafted on her bed, stirring into magic into morning metamorphosis arms claiming nothing, open and idle to the ceiling fan overhead, with fall passing the penumbra around me. In the evening, the Woolfes return finding comfort in my presence, and eyes that fondle within the estate, as I listen as the sprinklers pass, impaling the east side of the mother-in-law quarters, sounding like a warning, or a return fire, like children throwing rocks.

TWO 26 26

Another Poem About Ants

Above the glitter of shower spray there is a rainbow of ant carcasses crushed into the wall like headstones.

In the shadow of the dead, we laugh, whisper wiping and stroking our memories of the day with brush strokes

We turn our backs again, our bodies unite Igniting the iridescent suds into an alchemy until the retelling begins.

“I drowned the ones in your coffee cup” Angelina says, looking at the arch just above her head. You see--she loves to kill the ants, she makes the smoke stack rise above. She makes the morning coffee. The same coffee she will pass to me through the shower door. One cup -left in the shower, more than a dozen dead, our love a massacre coffee is the fuel and lure when the winter ants Come to hunt the great green basin through the shower door as we twist, gathering in a ceremony of steam and spotlight We find symmetry in the wickedness of the morning, a ceremony of shuffling feet where we share the warm water. 27 27

They Rise Like Giants

They rise like giants, shaking and scurrying amongst the others, and only I can see them coming.

From underneath the restaurant parking lot they rise like giants amongst the parked cars lit by the early evening sun. They form like wind, a dust bowl to take flight to rediscover what had been left behind, amongst the early evening gatherers they hover like vapor within the old tavern, suspended over steaming steak and sidecar. Some refuse their weightlessness and continue to handle imaginary canes and walkers that they will soon abandon at the hostesses desk. Evening dinner, a hobby of death before leaving on the inevitable stage of wine craft and waiters. Some will take to the restaurant, as long lost CIA agents of the dining hall, others summoned to register the new climate. A Forecast of spells over chowder and thermostat reaching for frozen They picking up the subtleties in the air, over forest green tuck and button vinyl. They watch old friends rise like giants towards the door. I often think that some come to showcase a new trick--to slide a fork loose from its marker, send a spoon to split the old paisley stained carpet.

And they watch with grey shaded eyes, unable to register a memory or name and imagine one last bite of prime rib with their stomachs empty of gravity, to imagine being satiated before leaving. Sometimes they flutter in before summer ends, draped in wool wings punctured with moth holes, ready to retell the last performance, a memory of images with no context. A summer love told a time when he had held her hand up at Slick Rock dipped within the slime of rock when he first saw her ancient body, bounded in his, adrift with telescopic eyes capturing the world in escalator.

28 28 They rise like giants in Technicolor dreamscapes in the flight of magnetic swings.

They rise like giants above the steady rush of forks to mouths.

They rise like giants, and the spirit of Mr. Lawrey continues to tunes his radio towards her heart; his last long ship out to sea, a beacon unrequited.

They rise like giants to feed your final sail, to call the others home.

They rise like giants with brittle poultry hips.

They rise like giants, an espionage and long nose like Nixon.

They rise like giants, and in winter and I watch them take an envelope for the ticket but life’s not as simple a train ride.

They rise like giants, dithering and collapsing on us like a building on fire.

They rise like giants, mustering flight through a paper propeller and an old photo grasped.

They rise like giants through the last cast off.

They rise like giants, long lost dinosaurs stretching across the dining hall with tiny arms and mechanical jaws.

They rise like giants and meander amongst the crowd, searching for the last holy golden gin martini.

They rise like giants; black tea the final schism and twilight every moment.

They rise like giants, but not all will hear their roar as they leave on motorized wheels and a parade on stilts somehow. 29 29

Gallery Deer

As if death were not enough taxidermy becomes purgatory for some, like the gallery deer stuffed, mounted with speakers ported into the body like the husk of an old car door. Reinvention comes late in life, and it has been two Christmases since I’ve spoken to brother Rodney, after I put my finger in his face, contemplating when to throw the cocktail glass into the wall. You don’t know what loss is! You don’t know what it is to lose anything! Look at Angelina, her mother passed one evening in a hospital alone, and Angelina on the sofa crying Momma Momma like a child to someone, something that does not remain. We have become frozen ever since.

An artist will try to ignite feelings with images and sounds to make levitation possible . Sometimes an answer comes in the waves of light, dancing to song- sometimes it is a shaking bucket glass-- with rocks colliding within. 30 30

Gallery Etiquette

Back in the corner, there is a ceremony going on and the only thing missing is my squeaking shoes.

Balanced tubules rise from the gallery floor waiting for me in a sacred circle of silence.

Perhaps I took too long, slept in, and the only way to communicate now is through touch but what I really want to do is hold them and if I could, what would they say?

Would they turn on me, like the young gal sitting at the gallery door?

She would kick me in the nuts, but here in this cave the shadows are lifeless, and all I could do is sit wait, listen and hope for sound, like the deep vibrating resolve of a didgeridoo.

31 31

Stay Strong Like Hemi

Catch me driving north bound on the 99 from the children’s home in Visalia. Forty- five minutes is much longer when piloting a 1964 Dodge dart GT.

It is like two hours in a cosmic battleship through most suffocating leg of the assault. I run parallel to the horizon, with my mantra, stay strong Like Hemi, but with the knowledge that there is a 225 slant six under hood, humming to the choked octaves of oil and stoniness. The hull is a cooker in the afternoon sun, and in the furrowed firmament I forget the family behind me. Farther ahead, at the new market on the corner, I’m no one’s father or son, just chaser of afternoon shadows with my dreams duck taped under shirt to my chest. Today I’m an ox on the road steering my load through the highway trees, and only a witness to the shadows of the old sycamores, whose outline are long like the thinness of my calf.

My black hoof will be on pedal, the pedal prodding at the heart of the engine, gas filling the aorta and then plummeting into the lungs. There will be no passengers on this part of the journey, just car parts, and bumpers like a lower lip with idiom. And the idioms are always something about “Lift off,” do not turn around, do not forget the co-pilot this time, keep enough blow to keep the old Dart afloat. Highway love and sweat on vinyl bucket seats working the pedal until I reach the new market on the corner that has been there for years--I have not. I thought a little green tea would do me well, something to stop the inflammation that had curled up inside of me like a wave, but it almost always never works. Launched, from Visalia to the opens arms of Fresno, and the runway is heavy with memories escaping me. I want to believe this feeling will eventually subside, but know that this is only the beginning, and I’ll reawaken someday, with the children in a room across the hall. For now I’ll stop into the market on the corner, where I’ll call the cashier brother, buy some tea, dark chocolate, and a couple of cans of black olives. 32 32

First Kiss

Our fate launched ten years ago under our first kiss, and time in-between like a wicked pinball losing its roundness to the unsteady quake of the San Andreas.

There was a time when I thought I knew what a lie tasted like. But we fell into each other despite the bitterness. We became a weird board game of colored dots on Matt’s arm chair.

And I tried to become numb to the unfamiliar territory, the ancient ceremony prescribed by La curandera, the “witch doctor” who could turn fear into numbness, and then fear into running, and then fear --into other fears, like not being able to make it home, a version of home that only a small child could imagine.

I should have been looking for a meeting and I failed to make our parlor a place to relax the sultry interior of red velvet sofas; that is my easy invitation to failure.

Maybe there will never be an ideal place to perfect a first kiss, but if there were I have come to learn that it should have been forecasted ten years and five days prior, and well before your father went to prison. You see my love--we could turn a life time into requiem in half a year, bury steel and imagine balcony, hold a street lamp hostage while thinking of headstone and contemplate an approaching light before we learn to get it right. 33 33

A Heart Shaped Uterus

Yesterday it was a pink heart On a black t-shirt, greeting me at the door, followed by her bedroom black panties with a glowing red heart on the crotch.

Today it is a heart shaped Uterus: Bicornuate. The unusual shape of her uterus Common in pigs and rodents seeming to elicit a sanctuary a cavity of safe keeping. And our tiny heart inside the heart working and evolving on the scale of fingernail. And they continue to sink into your ocean where a heart is starving to find its place, sleeping unsteadily in the waves of a heart. And this heart-- they might say too early for the heart, and hidden in the heart. Later, a metal rod to remove the heart. Hide in the heart. Do not let the body become palpable--run. Save your heart. A siege on the heart. Tomorrow a scab in her heart. Tonight the memory of our heart captured, and the message on a black t-shirt, black panties, seeming to be a warning for what resides in the ears of a heart-shaped uterus.

34 34

A Dream of Missing People

The first visitor was my brother Arnie my comrade to chase the ball down fourth Street in front of our childhood home until the runway street light rose above us taking us into flight, into dream. There are so many places to enter when you’re as thin and agile as we were then. And in the dream we went to hunt for Cousin Alfred. His room was the furthest, the furthest room from the hearth consisting of storage spaces where his voice lifted like a type of spent suspension, lingering like the billowing huffs of incense.

It was a room like a warehouse, a storage space where he towers, taking on the form like giant like Abuelito Perez, our grandfather. They say it must have been the Sanger water that mounted him so high so far, never a return to Christmas, never a return home.

And the uncles made excuses for his absence as they spend their canned beers outside next to a the old Barbeque and clothes line. The large bed he slept on seemed to swallow Alfred whole. And we wonder into listlessness of an old home, trying to find him again. Alfred is still missing.

It took three attempts to leave the home scurrying within these rooms like young celestial caretakers, never entering the kitchen and taking record of the account of large label-less cardboard boxes growing dimmer. In the distance, an afternoon porch appears welcoming the sun. We approach the light through a dusty screen door, pressing our tongues against the aged steel, like we were told not to do. 35 35 And the sun shown brilliant illuminating a long gated courtyard with a one winged ostrich-like bird, guarding the perimeter, waiting.

These kind of birds are grown in dreams with mechanical beaks that tear at flesh born to traverse the yard like drones waiting for intruders. It was here where I first lost Arnie. And I did not dare turn my back to look for him but instead imagined flight with legs like a gazelle to some other outside country waiting inside this neighborhood. It is true-- I had traveled too fast,

And I couldn’t help but feel a need to jump the pointed spear of the old iron fence. I had indeed become good at leaving the home behind.

As soon as I become lost, my children Max and Olivia find me in the old downtown square. We took to running, running because It had always been this way. Always trying to find home.

We went looking for the old market for spices and remedies like we had never done before. And because we were running it would seem fit that a mob would amass. It was a pulsating crowd in the fervor of hegemonic mania put to music to answer our resolve, to our presence. but the problem would remain unclear.

I kept the children close, long enough to recover, long enough for Brother Arnie to arrive. When he asked why this life had become what it was, I described to Arnie a mob, a chase, the birds at the gate, Alfred lost somewhere inside an old home and it seemed like we were being chased. This was our hometown somehow now consisting of rest stops and parking lots, a wondering and whirling spirit as our guide. 36 36

We live in a world of uninvited guest. separated listlessly into half-events and half-lives, half- truths, and all I wanted was to come home. And there was a news report that afternoon: a meteor shower at mid-day.

In the barbershop we stare into the old black and white television, listening as the news lady reports of a lonely psychotic woman who tried to consume her poor child’s head. From the captain’s chair we study the video as she pulled and pulled the child’s bloody nightgown from her mouth stretched around the poor child’s head. Streaks of blood are beginning to form at the corners where the tiny teeth like sea urchin punctured the child’s skull. They said the child recovered. Arnie went missing again.

The last chapter is about steel falling From an invisible scaffold in the sky And that is when it all began to fall; an invisible scaffold in the sky, and the large objects shaken from their position overhead shaped like boat anchors, but with the legs protruding like stiletto heels. They fall around us. They fall around us: the sharpened horns of barbwire the dark falcons grasp the large mutant black bird the crosses, the black metal crosses built in tons and children being shoved into suit cases shivering under parked cars.

And not a moment wasted, not a moment in fear; just a ritual to keep safe what the old clock tower will inevitably take. And the town would become what it was going to become. A man will dream of being a boy again --and run. And there are rules and guidelines in that dream -that people who will disappear will reappear, but remain missing in real time.

37 37 You can carry anything into the dream world: your body lumped in every degree like a compass of the soul, the freckled skin of an ox mask you wielded from clay, your body naked and painted blue like the ocean, but the large objects hammering and piercing the Bermuda grass of the town square at mid-day are from an ancient affliction passed along through your DNA.

It seemed as we were being chased. When I did finally awake I arose as I always did wanting a cigarette out the front porch while watching the cars asleep in their evening due. I still had not had a drink, and Sister Alicia and Brother Rodney still hated my father; they will remain missing indefinitely.

THREE

39 39

Mucho Means a Lot in Spanish

After receiving a cowboy belt buckle inscribed with the word “Mucho”…

And it felt like a rush at the bar With mucho Casadores seeping in Mucho barstools Mucho glow of electric light Mucho streams of colored water coming in, mixing up the anatomy Mucho stories to never be retold Mucho cars along Shaw Avenue that would never stop into places such as these Mucho trying to laugh

When she leaves, I see her face in the gloss of the old wood bar Mucho tears Mucho blue eyes of my Irish gal Mucho staring into the stars and dreaming of her Mucho heart crumbling Mucho smoke Mucho waiting Mucho fingerprints reaching back Mucho bucket glasses Mucho slamming of fists so that you can hear what I’m trying to tell you Much diamonds for her fingers when she returns Mucho “I love you” in her ears

Mucho means a lot in Spanish.

And when I return home Mucho driving down the 99 Mucho Dodge Dart underneath Much watching the highway pass through a hole in the floorboard Mucho cactus coloring my grandmothers fences when I arrive Mucho stories rising above the kitchen Mucho Manteca to cook los gorditas Mucho arms to catch me from falling Mucho folding chairs around a decorated table Mucho family Mucho broken glass Mucho retratos with smiles lighting the room Mucho tends to get the ball rolling 40 40 And it has gotten too late, the mind keeps going. Mucho bubble wrap my heart Mucho bubble wrap my body and tie me to a motorcycling screaming through this place Mucho bubble wrap my soul Mucho bubble wrap my liver Mucho bubble wrap me to her Mucho bubble wrap me to a train in the rain Mucho bubble wrap me to a tree, just until the ants have come to reclaim me Mucho bubble wrap my penis Mucho bubble wrap my penis Mucho bubble wrap my penis

Much means a lot in Spanish

41 41

A Man Wants My Children to Call Him Pops

Pops, like low gun fire A crackle in the distance A flash of light that can mean anything making its way to Fresno. A pop tries to make its way into all the surrounding noise, the countryside the wall paper.

I’m a spotlight watching fire. I’m watching the black snake turn white pull the trigger, it’s going to pop anyway.

A man wants my children to call him Pops. Write the check and I’ll gladly hand them over Multiply 10 grand times 20 years And I’ll gladly hand them over I’ll take payment in boats and exotic cars vacations to places far from here. I’ll ride in my silver Lamborghini Convertible, pop a cd in the radio Play a list of your favorite pop songs or just write the fucking check to my initials V for vitamins A -concentrated in anger tonight P for potatoes to fuel the muscles For the century ahead.

This is to the man who wants to buy my son a gun. Hold his arm up to rest hardwood pressed into steel. Watch an animal drop, bone bust, hear a pop, watch the fur collapse in dust. Buy me a gun-- I’ll pull the trigger this time.

42 42 This is for the man that wants my son to call him Pops Like a can of soda opening up into a stream, where you can fish until all the trout are pulled out but one of those fish will surely not commit to the surrender. And when you reach in to secure your hold, a burst of capillary, a pop of adrenaline will surely be exciting one eye open towards the sky another splintered into the worn wood of a boat. Think of me, like a fish on its last cold swallow or better yet, the shark landing on deck waiting for an wakening. And you wonder what it feels like to pull the water into flesh and your hands and fists want to handle the weight, the gills, the suffocating thin slice of skin, pouring out of the sea-into air.

Think of me. 43 43

Dog Attack

Each tooth a new sound. Each tooth a new instrument. Each tooth a new key on the piano of my leg.

The speckled hooded monster with a thousand eyes that lives on Chris's driveway is slowly approaching out of rhythm.

The beat staggers his already course stride, like a drunken drummer playing in a band within his already muddled mind. His talons claw and scratch the earth like nails on a washboard.

There is no one to whistle him home today, So my foot plays the dog's mouth, my hands flutter like the bows of violins, my mouth cries open into the low October sun. 44 44

I Wore My Father’s Gloves

I imagined I wore them high above the roof tops, gripping the steel spines of an old telephone pole, just as he did, in our backyard one late afternoon . I think now, that you gotta have strong legs to be able to puncture the poles tarred and chapped skin. From the beginning there’s a thud. The sound that make no blood, but message, like a murmur, like ancient Morse Code corresponding through the thick brown trunk, echoing and then dissipating into the clouds above.I still go to Sanger, and on bicycle from Fresno- it is more than out of the way. And in years since my mother left our hometown, and my father,

Sanger can be like a battle ground, a place where at times the bars, barbershops and bakeries are the only places that resonate goodness. You see- I’ve come to believe that there’s a heat that can be created with little return, and sometimes it is visualized in the old yard on 4th street, still home to the young palms my father planted years ago, standing today like giant sentinels at the throat of the front door. And in a dream, I go there, where I imagine a giant robot invader ripping through the old vines just over the canal behind our home. It is making its way, with a great shadow that will eventually eclipse the painted green steel of the swing set around me. I prepare to hear a scream, a tear in our lives, a suck of vacuum. And no matter what becomes of dreams, there will always be a horizon in Sanger, my father’s inescapable view: the thin line of steady dust rising, and then falling against him, palpable shapes that he must dismiss with every climb. I wonder if he still thinks about what was left behind, such as I do now: the garage, with the skeleton boats stuffed inside; the hard fences like trees, forming the perimeter of our yard; like fire, like burning pages in our history, adding volume to the already distant haze. 45 45

The Story of the Cat and the Dog

When asked, why did you bite the Cat? The dog could not respond. Neither could the cat when asked- Why had you made the Dog so upset to warrant such a response?

One must take stock of the world of animals, wonder, and ask-- Why we force our lack of humanity upon them, and our complexities on such simple beings that could not talk, nor respond?

It is not what they are, more of what they do the relentless pursuit of dogs; its whims to dig then push a mountain free; the deliberate action to pursue some kind of promise ,or fortune, of future, or at least make it appear that way. A cat can trip the largest animal; only a shift in the weather needed to make the oxen fall. Sometimes I hate the Dog, too curious of where these hands have been, wanting to decode the stifled communication. And whatever seems curious for the Dog carries no weight for the Cat. She can watch death mount and rise above her cathedral and only need pray for a multitude a way of killing itself through the broken window. Sometimes the Cat appears curious, but upon examination might only be itchy or hungry, emotions by which stir the Cat to filling its smallest ports. And if the performance fits sometimes, the Cat and the Dog are lovers, old friends somehow. 46 46

Navel to Apocalypse

Today, feathering mid-waist fingers taking flight, eyes tracing the long ravine of her spine. Face and lips hovering like drones breeching dew. Pupils like camera lenses with glowing aperture rings erupting and receding in joy, to mount these moments of moonlit seascapes. Her navel on my mind.

I want to cut her into cubes, eat her like kebob, or diced tripe of mother’s Sunday menudo. I want to season her with the captured salt gathered from the branches of my tongue, roll her into my tortilla arms again, and imagine her warm and colored, dark, like a black confetti apocalypse. 47 47

This Song

--You Tube commentary from music video “Postcards from Italy” by Beirut

This Song makes me feel invincible. This song makes me feel invisible. This song makes me feel nostalgic. This song is beautiful, and the last twenty seconds or so, as it slowly fades out, are just pure solace. This song (that I love so much) makes me jealous that I never went on holiday as a kid. This song makes me think of so many things. This song might be the cure for cancer. This song should be played at my funeral. This song brings me to the verge of tears, and then brings me back to the verge of laughter. This song makes me want to watch Atonement This is the only pure love song that I’ve ever liked. There’s no ulterior, “I miss You”—this song reflects sheer revelry in the throes of love. It’s beautiful and always cheers me up. This song is such a romantic song, it’s my song our song I cry every time I hear this song. So beautiful. This song saved me from suicide twice. This song always helps me remember that life is beautiful…and that beauty is usually found in the simplest of things, and the people we love. This song makes me feel better knowing that I will never date again. Dude, this song is obviously good. This song was stuck in my head all day, and I failed my math test because of it. This song reminds me of Kristie, and while drunk one night, after listening to it over and over, and after being broken up for years, I called her.

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Victor Perez

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June 1, 2015

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