Poems written in CAL Lab.

There’s a place where you have to slow down for the deer. Years and years ago, so he says, but they’re still there. He knows. The deer wont run out. Today I don’t believe the deer’s are there anymore, people get like to mount deer’s on their walls, and deer’s get scared when they see carcasses. Smoking, he says, he had to honk the horn to make them move. Silence—no one tell him the deer are all gone.


The old blind woman laughed at me when I fell. Face down on the swept dirt floor of her living room, kitchen, and bedroom. White gums showed when she giggled even boney fingers couldn’t hide them. Too drained to be offended, I laughed too. The barefoot granddaughter, my age, stands holding my offering of beans, rice, coffee, and sugar. Enough for a week.


Blood is thicker than time, over there. So they beat her when the telltale blood didn’t come. Blood makes more sense than trying to listen, sometimes. Skepticism, the root of gossip, leads the witch-hunt today, in broad daylight. Is it hard to wear you’re happy rainbow traje, is the monthly rag made of the same material? No blood this month, and next month when there is no belly, somehow they are still proud. She learned what happens, the say. A good lesson.