Three Poems Daniel Arias Gómez First Place, Ruth Stone Poetry Prize

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Cathedrals

Tío, the desert is a skin too. It peels off

just like anything else. I’d like to think you loved

nopales—that you went to market, picked up a few

in a plastic bag, sliced them, ate them like that, in between

your fingers. When I was young my family used to drive

to Rocazul for family gatherings at an old house—

red tile cracked, white walls water stained, bricks

worn down, scorpions everywhere, and black worms

bloated and disgusting with things that looked like thorns

coming out their bodies that made your skin burn

if you touched them, gusanos quemadores, and a small garden

where the light had trouble getting in through the heads

of the trees. At the center there was a statue

of San Juan Bosco, some saint who was poor and performed

tricks on the street for money. Every year, the skin

of the statue grew worse, green with moss, water

marks, the edges of the stone robes defaced, and

the face smoother, lighter, the nose, the hair, the smile,

his two hands reaching out to you,

to nowhere. You said

you liked it at the detention facility, that they fed

you at least. When your brother tried

to help you, take you off the streets, you threw a rock

at his window and broke

the glass. The police came for you. And now they won’t tell us when you’ll be

deported, or where, they’ll just leave

a note of your absence online, but my father doesn’t have the heart

to look. And even now I know so little

of you—vague mentions of drugs, mental

disorders, your parents abandoning you, the crossing

when you were young, a hand hitting you

on the face, a mouth screaming at you.

You worked

rolling carpets in Arizona, lugging them into people’s cars. You

gave me my first cerveza one day we were watching

football and my father stepped out and you handed it to me

and said córrele chingatela rápido, and you liked birds,

especially a cockatoo you named Chupe, and staring

at the desert at daybreak, and one time we saw

a road runner and you lectured me about my tattoos,

said the skin is a desert and the things we bury

in it become a road of cobbled stones

we have to walk. Michelle is leaving

for work soon, overnight shift at Denny’s. Once, Michelle’s mother

hit her on the face with a big wooden spoon, called her

a fat useless piece of shit, said she was going back

to Mexico and leaving her all alone. And when Michelle found out her father

wasn’t her real father, and she asked him if that’s why he treated her

differently than her siblings, why he treated her like a maid, yelled at her, made

sure she couldn’t go to college, he said, yes, and asked

for forgiveness.

Sometimes I don’t know how

to love someone. But what

if I said I think you’re wrong? What if I said the things

we bury in our skin make cathedrals out of us?

Tío, if they drop you off

on a cobbled road, put down your hand and feel the warmth of the

sun on the stones.

The desert is a skin too, tío

I’d like to think you loved

Ode to Sprinklers

If the factory is a kind

of cathedral, this is how you pray—

your calloused hands at the assembling

line counting plastic nails, counting little

plastic spheres, red, purple, dark green,

counting filters, irrigation hoses, stakes,

bullets, counting long metal pieces, narrow,

hollow, your calloused hands

at the gluing table making

filters, gluing pvc pipes to couplings,

getting dizzy because of the fumes, shivering

because it’s freezing inside

the factory and your fingers are numb

but you still need to take off your gloves to handle the small

pieces, standing by the turkey deep

fryers the workers call las ollas used

to soften the pipes to attach the sprinkler

heads, heads wearing goggles and

ear plugs, then back

at the gluing table where Maria goes

on about a flu epidemic and about how she’s scared

her grandson caught it, and the smell

of burning plastic reminds you

of a doll your father bought

you at the Cherry Avenue Auction after

you nagged him for half an hour and he said

he’d only get you one thing so you

better be sure, and you said you wanted

that doll, and you remember

it came in a cardboard box and had plastic

limbs so hard you could barely

move them, and you smile and

tell Maria about this one time

you were nine or ten and you asked your father

for money and he said no, he said he had

to work for his money, so you got the idea

of washing the neighborhood’s cars for money, and then Joe

your brother wanted in, and then Timothy and Arthur

from two doors down wanted in too, so you’re all

going around asking people if they want

their cars washed, but nobody’s saying

yes, so you say, what if we tell them

we’re from the church and we’re washing

cars to collect donations? and after that

people start saying yes and let you wash

their cars for ten dollars a pop until

this one fucking bitter guy frowns and asks you

what church you’re all from, and everybody panics

and you cannot remember for the life

of you what’s the name of the church you go

to every Sunday, it has narrow arched windows and a red

steeple with a bird’s nest on one corner and a tacky wooden Christ

with blood that looks more like ketchup on his face and pews

that feel cold in the morning even with a sweater on and Timothy says, what church

do we go to? and then everybody runs, and later

you divide the money four ways and go

home, but the fucking bitter guy couldn’t let go

and knocks on your door and tells your dad what you were

doing, and your dad looks really serious, his usually slumped shoulders

suddenly straight, but once he closes the door after the guy leaves he bursts

out laughing and tells you not to do it again but asks

how much you made and then he laughs harder.

If the factory is

a kind of cathedral, this is how you pray—your hands, full

of blisters, holding on to pvc pipes as you imagine

the water that will run through them and back

into the dirt of someone else’s home.

Say Your Hands Scar

say your hands scar and

blister and know the cut

of a cold morning as you take

a broom to swipe the mulberries

on the patio or wash the dishes

still clinging to bits of

fried fish or cradle the neck

of a guitar trying to remember how

to tumble down a mixolydian

scale or clutch the last pieces of a california

roll from the fridge

it begins easy enough in the bark

of a tree peeling off in the brick

wall clinging to the afternoon’s

warmth in the damp clothes swinging

on the line there are no rivers

here but sometimes when it rains the water breaks

on the trees’ branches and leaves

a lingering smell of wet dirt say

your hands remember

the liquid touch of hair and

say bones break and skin peels

off like strings from a guitar it begins small

enough

michelle wakes up at twelve

in the morning to go to work at a chicken factory

she puts on a brown rubber boot then

she sits there for a moment staring

at the other boot in her hands say your

hands know the cut of the cold air

inside the factory as you cradle

the corpses of chickens and drive a knife

down their middle tear the muscles and break

their skin apart say your hands

know rain and light and the bark of

lips peeling off like breath in the window

on the factory’s wall growing bright

as michelle works through saturday’s

mandatory overtime and say that skin

is a wall holding on to the afternoon’s

warmth and stained purple from

the mulberries falling from the branches a man

sleeps next to a pollo loco’s drive-thru a boy

hauls the corpse of his mother across the desert and

sergio the handy man comes over to replace our

broken fan and he tells me a story about his wife’s

cancer about how he tried to kill himself but

found god as he puts our old fan inside

the cardboard box it begins small enough you

wake up to go make iced vanilla lattes

at starbucks sell internet to people at comcast

say your hands know the weight of the muscles

stretching in the cut of a cold morning so tired

you need to take a moment before you put on

the other rubber boot still

waiting in your hands

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[av_one_half]Daniel Arias-Gómez was born and raised in Guadalajara. He holds an MFA in Poetry from CSU Fresno. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, New Ohio Review, Poet Lore, and others.[/av_one_half]