Corrida
…all stories
if continued far enough end in death…
-Ernest Hemingway
It was for the novilladas, the beginners,
The
matador, the flourishes,
And the backs turned on death
That I begged my father to take me
to the bullfight
The summer we spent in Ciudad de Mexico
As far from the influences of drugs
and sex
As he could remove me when I was seventeen
The last summer before I got pregnant.
He went with me everywhere: to the plaza
Bargaining for the silver trinkets for my sister
and mother
To the bodega for the cigarettes
He let me smoke in front
of him
To the pool where he sat upright, reading,
In hard shoes in the shade as I sunned myself,
bored.
For the corrida we had sombra seats, the best,
Sparsely filled. As the sun’s
orange deepened
Town boys from the gradas came down,
Sat around us, sometimes reaching
out
To touch my gringo hair. In the ring, I expected
The pirouettes with the muleta, color
against dust.
Not the other red, cascading down the beast’s black flanks—
To see the splattered
velvets, matador, and hide,
To smell the pinkish foam, the bull’s droplets mixed with sweat
When he shook his enormous neck,
The banderillas sinking deep, lodging in muscle,
fluttering vibrantly—I
didn’t expect.
One of the boys put an arm around me: No mires, no mires
He
whispered into the air. My father stood
Scattering the boys like pigeons.
He smoothed the creases
in his pants, appeared to stretch his legs,
Sat again, closer in the swelter,
Draped his arm across
my shoulders.
The bull, front legs collapsed, shimmered,
Silenced, as my father and I were,
By
the merciful, now, puntilla.
My father refused to let me accept an amputated ear,
Still warm,
held up first to me, then to him,
The gesture for bravery, for not looking away.
Red
A bottle of nail
polish falls to the floor—
all the crimson of my life reflected in that glistening pool:
copper
braids of my third-grade best friend
cut off, delivered in a long box, like roses, after she died;
my
mother’s lip print on a folded Kleenex in an evening bag,
a smile from her grave;
lacquered
Corvettes drag raced to death one summer;
my prom dress unworn, the color of what was left
of my date’s foot—who mows the lawn before a dance?
the uterine stain: you’re
a woman now,
the secret stain when, at last, I was;
cramps that didn’t
come, the clinic, the slow drain out;
cupid’s bow of my baby’s mouth
bird-opened for my purple nipple;
dawns I rocked into being, my infant’s fontanel my sun,
God; embers under an ash blanket whipped
alive from the barest breath;
in an attic corner,
my father’s gnarled cherry cane;
my own knuckles gnarling every year I gain on my mother;
relic
cars, the two-door coupe in my garage
ordered by my father direct to his door,
keys delivered to
his vibrating ninety-year-old palm;
New Orleans velvet cake
just one slice, I’d
settle for a sliver;
the failures of the heart; heart failure,
killing my friends, more
every year;
my pen bleeding out;
eye whites threaded through with veins;
you,
when I tell you we’re getting old
and you show me we are not.
