Spring of my senior year in college I needed to buy a dress for graduation. Not just any dress, of course. Vaya, my mother had said. So we drove to the mall, our special mother-daughter terrain. We were experts at tracking discounts. Tuesdays were retail markdown days. The salespeople at Macy’s gave out coupons. And twice a year, if you purchased full-price bras at Victoria’s Secret, you got a free lip-gloss.

A teacher walks up to pull me out. “___.” I turn distracted from the assembly, the African storytellers, but follow. We walk down the hallway to a small office in a corner of the school I never go to. A woman (skinny, blonde, should I tell this?) there behind the desk. She starts to ask questions about my family.

the pair she wears on the original
cover of My Wicked Wicked Ways

bloody red lips shape into her
the-world-is-my-oyster smile

black spaghetti strap dress
pulls up high over crossed legs

an almost empty glass of merlot
stands at her dainty booted feet

boots with white stitching
crisscrossing Mexican black
leather like intricate tattoos on a
one-eyed bartender’s bicep

Here then am I, living in a Midwestern college town, when I decide to revisit A Room of One’s Own. “A good dinner is of great importance,” I read as I sit at my kitchen table. “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well,” writes Woolf, “if one has not dined well.”

It’s been like impossible
to get a good ounce
of smoke in this town
since thisTradeCenter
shit went down
says the Puerto Rican mayor
elect ofGun Hill Road
My connect is gonna hafta
start submarinin my weed
up theBronxRiverhe says
and you can tell
by the way
no one is laughing
out loud that it
might be true because
the corner is so thirsty
pipe dreams now skip
the raisin stage and dry
up into piles of human
excrement on the sidewalk 

                                              "Life is a lot to swallow,
                                                 death is only a gulp.”
                                                              Miguel Hernandez

I’m getting soused under the full moon
in memory of you, Luis Omar Salinas.
I’m thinking of the angles of a crowbar
in memory of you. The graceful way
it has of curving in my hands . . .

...a mighty woman strides, the lights of her city pale behind her, the graves of the unidentified, the working children...she might raise her hand to her head in any of a dozen places, stop right here if she isn’t careful, but there’s no time for tears, no space for that imprisoned lightning...

Little Red Riding Hood. The Three Little Pigs. Cinderella. These were all fairy tale books I read and reported on in my third-grade class. Our teacher, Mrs. Sinoway, expected us to sit in a chair to the right of her oversized desk and read our favorite parts of the story. Each of us took a turn in front of the class while she sat behind her desk, like a queen in a throne with her white flesh spilling over the furniture, listening.

The only Mexican that ever was Mexican, fought in the revolution
and drank nightly, and like all machos, crawled into work crudo,

letting his breath twirl, then clap and sing before sandpaper
juiced the metal. The only Mexican to never sit in a Catholic pew

was born on Halloween, and ate his lunch wrapped in foil against
the fence with the other Mexicans. They fixed old Fords where my

grandfather worked for years, him and the welder Juan wagered
each year on who would return first to the Yucatan. Neither did.

It is about the street lights, the housing projects, the cookouts. It’s about the Division of Youth and Family Services, the PR Day Parade, the bodegas, the Cherry Blossom Festival, the street fights, the smell of cement in the air after a hot summer’s day rain.

It’s the Temptations, MJ, and the cassette tape collections of Motown’s greatest.

It’s about fried chicken, mud pies, visits to Mom, an interracially mixed surrogate family.