Selected Works, Amelia Díaz Ettinger

 
For No Particular Reason
 
on these walks of mine
my bird is the towhee
—rufous-sided to be exact
I like her unassuming
dress of brown
with hints of white patches
flashing on her tail
as she flies towards a branch
but maybe what calls
me to her is her song
chup chup chup seeeeeeeeee
such a plain song
a clear song
a celebration song
makes me wonder
how can she be so content
in her noisy rummage
among dead leaves
that startles me awake
such a necessary reminder
to sing

Lymphoma This time,

and for five months I hold your life with my secret string.

Never been good with a fishing rod, yet this I have mastered.

I know how to pull, to grasp, to anger.

This is not the life we wanted, it is the life

we knew we were losing, over and over.

Cancer, our constant companion even in our bed.

A ménage à trois in our marriage, if I let it.

This demon-lover clutches your bones,

cruising in your veins like a lost gondola.

We never went to Venice.

In Spain we saw Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son.

I looked and thought, ‘that is how it is.’

So, I swallowed gallons of my anger with your toxins.

Each drip of the chemo tasting like rust,

the iron in your red blood cells exploding corrosive.

Your flesh forms loose contours over your skeleton

visible under my fingertips, I palpitate the poison

navigate the river’s ripple motion under the surface.

I touch this radioactivity, and pretend to be a healer.

Again, I swallow gallons of anger with your toxins,

toxins that have done their trick one more time, for now.

Yet it left a residue all over our house, orange desert dust.

Did Saturn swallow his son’s head whole?

I clean and rearrange, try to straighten

allow my anger to dress in red-hot-high-heels.

Let it walk towards the porch without a duffle bag.

Let’s go to Italy, or the living room, and just look

at pictures in a travel brochure, see more paintings

of Goya’s black walls inside the Prado.

Now I have to remit the residue of these months,

let the string go, see it float away as spider’s silk.

Just to wonder when will I have to reach for it again.

I Like los Traviesos 

Mi amiga is proud that her granddaughter is docile, suavecita. 

For her I write and say, “Listen chica to this poem.”

I like naughty kids, los traviesos, who run and giggle around 

with a mother trailing with a chancla or spoon in hand.

I like nippers that soil their clothes as they crawl under the house.

Especially when you told them not to find creepy crawlers or skeletons.

I like los mal-educados who won’t say, Yes Sir, Yes Ma’am,

but weight and ponder someone else’s fate and spirit.

I also like the children that shed their selves as they run

to save an endangered turtle or climb a cliff to warm a condor’s egg.

—A si me gustan, impish, mischievous with sangre in their misconduct.

I like those sin-vergüenzas when they have a tantrum 

carrying signs in a Black Lives Matter march until their throats are raw.

I particularly like the girls who aren’t suavecitas but obstinate,

chiefly with their bodies. They yell, kick, and pluckily point their fingers.

Yes, it is true, I love all the wicked revoltosos who stand

and make trouble, the good trouble, compassionate trouble. 

Sorry About the Shoes

His sister-in-law is with me,

in his old bedroom

with the new hospital bed.

I choose his clothes.

“This is a nice suit,” she says.

It is. But it isn’t him.

He liked dark tuxedoes 

and light guayaberas.

A whole shelf to the right of this closet

dedicated to cologne, and handkerchiefs.

All machine embroidered with his initial, ‘E.’

Opening this closet pauses me.

Like finding him in the hallway

of the casino, unexpectedly, wanting.

Old Spice, sandalwood and father.

My father, mi Papi, gone now beyond

these closet doors.

“What about this one?” she asks.

Another pin striped suit. 

Is she showing me the same suit over and over?

I remember him fitted by his favorite tailor.

“No, no, not that one.”

Each suit and shirt

familiar and foreign. My fault

I’ve been away too long.

The colors blur together

numbed from unmoored.

Can color do that? 

His death we had expected for most of his life.

Tenaciously holding on like a ceiba tree.

He was my father and mother. Not quite my friend.

Now, I get to choose

what comforts he takes. He was so fearful of death.

His sister-in-law is patient.

She waits as my hands fondle

silk, cotton, polyester.

A fabric parade of decades.

I find a suit in the very back. 

Still has the tag.

An outrageous price, that pains me.

The price of a dying dandy.

“This one will do.” 

The sister-in-law sighs, 

looks at her wristwatch.

Have I chosen poorly? I wonder

what happens to the rest of his clothes?

His closet is a veritable rainforest 

of solid and serious fashion.

But his habitat is not him.

Quite his opposite.

A bolus blocks my throat.

“Are you okay?” She is so kind for asking.

Papi was a jokester with bad timing. 

Ready for a laugh or heat to anger.

Papi carries — carried — sadness like a cloak.

Do all comedians, or magicians, do that?

After the burial she asks,

“What shoes did you pick?”

I have no answer and a coldness

rises inside my bowels.

What kind of daughter sends 

her father to an afterlife in silks

and barefoot?

Beautiful Rebellion

If I am a weed, the alien

to be plucked 

out of this garden

forced to be manicured,

I say,

not today.

Today

I am surrounded by the buzz 

of honeybees,

and sunlight bites my thighs,

as a playful lover could.

Let’s meet 

in the center green 

where so much beauty grows;

surrender your sheers

share with me this blush…