Zona Red
April ties me up and spits me
into your lovemaking.
We can devour
all-you-can-eat ribs and call it
consequence. Make us look
like my stepfather. Callow,
always waiting to jump my bones. Knocks me in the head,
discovering how he walked free —
no sex offender,
no jail time.
He found my body. Inner thighs
nicked with a needle, ocotillo wired
tight towards my sex. A blood-yellow bruise.
Took me to the top of the Catalinas.
I remember the Japanese
prison camp, now a café, where you buy me
oversized cookies.
Angels
are rarely hungry. They strip me
from my agency.
Since April,
you let me sleep
where your hands stop mid-thrust,
then collapsed
into your nightmares. Your snores
a crackling in the cricket air.
I speak intimacy
when you press my breasts
to your forehead. A tapered graze.
Last April, still in Tucson,
I watched my stepfather on the TV screen. You slept
like Angels at the foot of our bed
couldn’t hurt us.
Your cock taken care of.
Sometimes, only my rape remains.
I’m buried
in the Angels’ waltzes.
Maybe to pin us to heaven.
Of angels waltzing out their wingspans, who remains compassionate? When you hear the sound of roses, know that the ceiling was way too low. – Justin Chin Evan Isaiah, if you are an angel, let me spread out like rope spliced around a victim’s feet: ride them until I see the angels. I promise. I hope to turn amputations into jasmines the way a mining field turns its copper into skullcaps. Even tradition could not save my grandfather from another man’s knife: could he see his yellow roses kissing rape, my yellow darkness moving? Could I unbind your American dollars, gold jewels, and heroin hidden in the underbelly of the bathroom sink — tufts of balled cheesecloth lining the loose pipes? Silly boy. Thought I could graft all the women in my house the way you forget your hands.
A History of Angels Within three years of leaving foster care, 60% of young men have been convicted of a crime, according to the Midwest Study of the Adult Functioning of Former Foster Youth. I hear my best friend screaming on the road Evan Isaiah, what does it mean to create doubleness? When I hear his crackling voice which is his girlfriend’s protest in Hayward Hills I’m unsure why standards like these return from the probation officer to cull me out in a few years the voicemail of Evan Isaiah from jail will have been for a loss of words timed just like the girl’s disbelief my brain dreams no faster and these dream doves of mine with their teething like rope spliced around a victim’s feet ride me until I see the angels I know Evan Isaiah’s strength and remembrance I know we were afraid of quieting other bodies like our guardian’s fists on our sister are we bad ground or ashes I know our bedroom with musical instruments like ghosts I know the end of a nine millimeter Glock pistol put my nailbeds to our guardian’s lips he licks them once twice busts over laughing there is no benediction for straggler or abductor the girl who suffocated under Evan Isaiah’s hands — the smear of his bile and her outrage — what else do you splice besides fingers? two spools of blood her blond hair stuck in his nailbeds I am not my guardian he repeats he can make the blood gush out of her nose: believe me he cares when the gas station attendant calls 911, Evan Isaiah runs to her car: gold locks stuck to the keys the responsibility of colonizing her body like Celan pressing her a rose between books Evan Isaiah strafes the bodies plying cotton in the fields lifts their fingers to the angels’ light
Say in the Night the ants nick the dirt from my skinned knee. I rock back and forth beneath the pine tree, barefoot, skimming the pebbles with my toes. Warm with drink, my guardian’s eyes — blue as the lowest heavens — breathes in our place: the ocotillo and mesquite branches, how a cactus pricks my heel and I’d lie supine, waiting for his touch. The failure of my body to wake nearly every hour, to scream at my brother weaving in and out of the trees, his lithe body straight and proper. Like the red dirt, their ants lick my toes, a sediment. Say in the night, I follow my brother as I read Hansel’s breadcrumbs: what greater love is there but for the one who cares for me most? My guardian’s knife-sharp mouth, his eyes blue with his wetness, packs his lips, grinds mine. A drum, the obsessive sound: we cannot carry the preceding motif into the higher octave. Because our piano has no third eighth, says Beethoven, the chords-in-question a waning obsession: the separation of trees, of my brother covering my mouth and whisking me away.
Early June, When We Break An ocotillo tears my right heel. And through the party, your skin hardens, pushing from your trunk towards my limit, my freedom, • the frenzied winds of a dust storm on the I-10. How my beloved resists me in the dark, heaving. Your impulse to destroy us a naivety: you were free enough to believe you could navigate • the terrain of other women’s hunger — : break their hands, unscathed. The scrim of my beloved’s longing • looks like a water cache as you hike with No Más Muertes. Humming under your breath, you click through the scrub hills like you would my body: swung, the same damn kindness that permitted me to fall for you. Our sex is slow; our dirt, • bombast; our compassion a coming-to-terms, the work of drug or drink or sleep — : our desert. A provocation. Hot pan de sal in your fists, you insist you can take out a god; you can leave more sun- • bristled water bottles for ICE to mask your scent. To find something left to love. To act as my man means to empathize, to leave alone someone alive. Because I love you. Through my arms and my neck, and when • the steam has thrown our dizziness from each other, we’re still walking home. Like stars from the Mexico side of water, wherever “legal responsibility” becomes moral, as if this still means be human. A crime • against humanity, devoid of decency, is witness, a stink of manure and vomit, a breakdown of the heart — under the sun. Our earth’s vapors — all of it, the decent thing to do — pulse into my purpled skins.
•••
Sylvia Chan hails from the San Francisco Bay Area, where she performed as a jazz pianist. She now lives in Tucson, where she teaches in the Writing Program at the University of Arizona, and serves as court advocate for foster kids in Pima County and nonfiction editor at Entropy. Her debut poetry collection is We Remain Traditional (Center for Literary Publishing, 2018). Her essays appear in Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019.