GUEST POET: BONNIE DANIELSON
White Like Chickens, for Survival
This is the Blue Moon where there is dancing and where young women lose their reputations.
Here is the tienda de botones and the meat store where fly-specked strips of meat toughen in the sun.
Here is the high school and the comedor where a man's face was shot from his head as he ate his meal
(the red vinyl being easy to wash). This is the part of town called Ojo del Agua. Last week
a thirteen-year-old girl was raped and killed here. She was a tomato vendor and her parents
looked for her for days. This road is gravel turning into pavement at the center of town.
The pavement circles the four blocks that make the Parque Central. Here is the wall the El Rey driver
ran into with the bus. He had no license and had been drinking. It will be several weeks before
the adobe can be made to repair it. This history is like a map. As time progresses the bare spots
only previously connected with a few veins of lines network out into capillaries and arterials.
Names and small pinpoints and dots appear to fill in what one doesn't know. However,
it could work in reverse.
If I rearrange the facts, if I tell you a dream, if I tell you a real incident and if I do not tell you which
facts belong to which will you misunderstand? Arla and I stand on a piece of plywood in the field.
Dennis and Darrell stand on another. The plywood covers the holes of the foxes who live in the cornfield.
My father stands by the largest hole. His pickup is parked nearby, the bed of it covered by five-gallon
metal pails of water. My father pours pail after pail of water into the hole. A friend, Dana, misreads a line
in a novel about a fox and writes a poem about it. He tells me the poem was written for me, although
it was really written years before in Oklahoma City. We both understand that when I smile my teeth
are white like chickens to him, for survival.
This is the Luna Azul, on the outskirts of town, the button store and the carniceria. Here is the colegio,
the eating place with its stiff, red, vinyl chairs and the formica tables. This is the barrio Eye of the Water.
The road is gravel turning into pavement at the center of town. The pavement goes around the four blocks
that make the Parque Central. Here are the two bus terminals, El Rey and Aurora, on opposite blocks.
Here is the cloth store and the pulperia. This is the same town. It disappears and reappears little by little,
the dots of memory fading with constant sun and heavy rain.
The little foxes run around the outside of the house, their prints like butter on the frosty October ground.
I press my face against the upstairs window and watch them. Out in the field their tiny, wet heads bump up
against the plywood. The water that my father pours into their network of tunnels and dens drives them
to the back exits they had dug for emergencies. This is what it feels like to hold death. The foxes circle
the house I live in. The outside world is dark. I turn the porchlight on and the yardlight. My father is in the barn,
his cheek against the soft bellies of the cows. There is light from what I have turned on, but I cannot get to my father.
Here is the thirteen-year-old girl and her breasts are just beginning to burst out like the cold nose of a little fox.
Her sharp, white teeth could nip out at anyone who touches them. No one has tried to touch her yet.
Here is the man who has been drinking all night at the Blue Moon. He is, at this point, as tender as any father
could be, weeping into his Salva Vida because of his life. This is the tendon of love, a choice to either
love or tear or have one's jugular torn out. The Blue Moon closes its doors at sunrise. The vendors
from the outlying towns and houses meet and pass the Blue Moon patrons making their unsteady ways home.
Here is the thirteen-year-old girl thrown roughly onto her back in the weeds by one of the patrons.
She is thinking, "So, this is what it feels like to hold death!" Her little breasts snarl like young animals
without food. The town lights alternately glow and fade in the background. The button shop and the comedor
are there, then they're not. The corn field and the pavement disappear and then reappear as other structures.
The barrio is dark as the eye of the water is. It lacks electricity.
Note: Jonah and Ms. Candide have picked up the "fox" meme, so I return the volley. Bonnie is a fine poet I knew in Denver. She wrote this prose poem in 1989 when I gave her a copy of FOX (PoD 77). She has since vanished from the face of the earth.
11:16:42 PM 
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