Dirty

Brazil.  We packed hot heat
In the streets like rodent rats
And someone’s dirty fingernails
Took a chunk from my flesh,
From my neck.  Just walking
In the road, from behind.
I bled soil blood and soiled
My good white blouse all down
The back, and my mother took me
To a voodoo doctor in the city
With vinegar eyes and purple hands
Caked with red mud.
Because we were poor and couldn’t
Afford the pristine sheets and sterility
Of the Big Hospital, the guarantee
Of a closed stitch.  Needless to say,
There is a scar. 

Wax tulips. The same color
As the candy we press to our lips,
Grinning out over the flat bed
Of somebody’s father’s pick-up truck,
That trucks away at night,
With us still in the back, legs near the edge—
Speed pouring all over us
We press blankets to our ears,
Screaming, screeching sobs,
Because no one can hear them
And they don’t matter.

Venezuela.  Where we burnt
Because we were white, and
The dogs ran after pick-ups,
Howling, chasing the dust,
As Daddy listens to classical music
With the windows up, and no one hears
Danny protect us in the back
With the Western pistol,
He picks them off one by one. 
Corpses in the road. 

Dirt.  Daddy had black fingernails,
Grime from the cigarettes,
He smashed down the stubs,
On the table cloth, on armchairs,
And hold out your hand, on the palms
Of his small white children,
You’d be surprised how little it hurt,

Mexico.  And for a while, no one complained.
Danny joined the long-limbed, cinnamon children
On the roof tops, leaping from branch
To branch and branch.  In the city,
I felt out of place with last years’ sandals on my feet. 

My sister went to high school,
With her hair cut back, she squirted
Lemon and Sun-In all summer long,
And by September she was orange,
Just like a mango, a melon.

And then the trailer burned down. Soot.
Propane leaked from our ears, reacting
With the open flames that seemed
To have been left so carelessly,
Around this home.

We lived like the other dirty families.
We were all the same.  Every little brother
Was a 7-year-old with a mustache, 
Every sister had one hand on a spatula,
And the other on her coat button,
On the rollers in her hair.

California.  Daddy took Danny
Out to the Sound, and made him swim laps
Until dawn, and then, Daddy hit Danny hard.
Black—and then all liquids, bile, it made
A mess of his eyes, one turned in for good. 
And the next day, my mother pressed
Maxi pads to Danny’s head,
As the life leaked out. 

2007 Rosetta Young