Rio Bravo

Your rocking chair, 
outside the border of Darien,
on these plain terms, 
you embraced the night,
with cigarette smoke bunting
my faded Abuelo,
grandmother and three brothers
sway-telling on vultures overhead,
in America, already
measuring the distance
in language.

My father on his last night,
in a town founded by Holguins
beside open ranch stars, 
could he see the day
he'd feather through
sewers, the smell of shirt-knock 
doors, past bedtime, 
past an incantation braver, 
where on my bedrest
he'd simply read 

a tired grace bound in composition, 
not of his making,
where his elk would dream 
in verse
gliding ellipses,
in hilltop incense 
and strangle 
through bunting     barrier     language 
where 

both cities crept so far from Rio Bravo.
 

Breaths from the Fifth House

"I wear breaths from the Fifth House.
Sweat lust potion,
cologne-seeped centaur
inside a pentagon's heart,
I'm half man, half zamuro,
while you tripped past the door knob, son!"
 
No. no. no.
Know all about
Dior perfume still
lapping the air, Cousin.
I invented the spinning,
the post-mortem focus,
cherry-vanilla candles once
sprinted her scent on my mind.
 
"But I'm wired this way, dog,
can't turn off Venus in the Fifth House!"
 
(Air, spinning, more focus…)
 
You'll learn to safe-crack a door knob
ending in nightly, before that energy
transfers, all you got is
hotel rooms called SportsCenter.
Word. Sex-humming highlights,
 
I wanna say brave.
"And I'll walk home a whore
not to spit out her hair? Hah!"
 
Stifle the brushing, the horse fumes, my Cousin-
keep the heart sealed at home, not outside.
 
But I'm a whole
Man, and so I say,
"Must admit, she's hungry as human inside!"


Photobomb a Shutter

In a nightclub 
line redefined 
what it meant 
to grind 
a stiletto toe cap 
inside the mind, 
photobomb a shutter.
Blink, 
a new time, 
a time of brutes, we sink
outside the Crosby 
waiting on memories 
to start 
when she decides 
to be captured.
 
Past a pose already in motion,
not to star, just to see
what's holding shit up- 
picture taken, grunts escape 
framed in the smart phone
of what would be
an Instagram heart. 
Snap. 
Shutter. 
Scream.

She is bludgeoned 
to red  
by Grendels, 
face in concrete, 
10 legs,
a utility box, 
8-second video-she the star 
no one comes 
to be captured.

In this memory, 
they watch instead, 
text-message the melee,
hashtag the world
star/pound 
til her breath gets lost
and can't find home. 
Unconscious, 
beaten 
to memory,
no one stepped in.
 
Because she stepped in
to belong or 
by accident, we
photobomb a shudder.
And what would've been a post, 
with 18 likes, 
turns the price of her life
unshared 
beyond a Saturday 
night in Santa Ana  
Kim Pham, 23, 
was gonna be a writer.