Poetry

Brooms! Buckets! Açai! Mangos! Melons! Bootleg CDs!Bikinis on mannequins that look like sex dolls dancing in open air.The coconut man’s at his stand, grinding the flesh into piles of snow.He asks me to marry him and as I consider,an elderly couple trundles by with a load of root vegetables.Their frayed plaid jackets match, their arms are wrapped aroundeach other’s waists. You could just tell she’d given birthto several babies, now grown and living in distant

Cremation in Mexico Our father, lying face-up in his linen jacket and good pants on the black rubber assembly-line conveyer belt that was jerking toward the furnace in this outdoor industrial yard on the outskirts of the city—where who knows what was disposed of—no plush chairs, background music orundertaker nodding solemn in his suit but only this gravel ground and a conveyer belt so narrow our father barely fit—and as it moved his body slipped—my