My Daughter's House

My Daughter’s House

Mi hija, your house faces its palms frontward
where they drop coconuts, crack goes your windshield,
out back agoutis rustle like rats, coatis slash your screens,
a boa coils beneath the trampoline. Bats swoop, scooping
up mosquitoes. Still, Zika dots your skin. What scurries
in the kitchen? You cry for Angélica: Mata al escorpión!

Shadows hiss, press me in, the jungle holds my breath.

Jungle began in Sanskrit as rough and arid jaṅgala,
fevered green traveling the world tripping
on above-ground roots, not letting us forget how tangled
we are, how too much wind in the canopy
can topple everything. Zeta knocked on your roof
rocking the baby’s crib and felling the ancient
ceiba next door with its axis mundi floating above,
its pochote pods no more fluff your yard.

 Shadows hiss, press me in, the jungle holds my breath.

Mi hija, let the yellow-throated one surprise your winter,
kiskadee at the window catching flies. Blue morphos
spark like opals blinking to alight. Fringes of passionflower
purple the rain, and what fragrance that sweet jasmine.
There, no bigger than a fingernail, a baby mantis on your daybed
prays in dapples lit with sun – let the whirlwinds pass us by.

 La selva sips the light, loosens up my tongue: tu casa, tu casa.

 

Maiden Shave

(published in Poet Lore)

A crook of pale purple plastic
Shaves nine years of innocence
While I stand by
More than merely witness.
 
My daughter has seen
Towers falling from the sky,
Her president engulfing us in war,
A bushy-brow’d grandpa die.
 
Yet is she first in her class
To see three or four soft blond hairs
Growing wildly under each arm?
 
Though I squint to find them,
She wants them gone.
 
So I help her
Erase nature’s order
With her own.