Unaccompanied - Javier Zamora

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Seeing Your Mother Again

      44  Exiliados

      45  June 10, 1999

        About the Author

        Also by Javier Zamora

        Acknowledgments

        Copyright

        Special Thanks

       To Abuelita Neli

      This is my 14th time pressing roses in fake passports

      for each year I haven’t climbed marañón trees. I’m sorry

      I’ve lied about where I was born. Today, this country

      chose its first black president. Maybe he changes things.

      I’ve told Mom I don’t want to have to choose to get married.

      You understand. Abuelita, I can’t go back and return.

      There’s no path to papers. I’ve got nothing left but dreams

      where I’m: the parakeet nest on the flor de fuego,

      the paper boats we made when streets flooded,

      or toys I buried by the foxtail ferns. ¿Do you know

      the ferns I mean? The ones we planted the first birthday

      without my parents. I’ll never be a citizen. I’ll never

      scrub clothes with pumice stones over the big cement tub

      under the almond trees. Last time you called, you said

      my old friends think that now I’m from some town

      between this bay and our estero. And that I’m a coconut:

      brown on the outside, white inside. Abuelita, please

      forgive me, but tell them they don’t know shit.

       Saguaros

      It was dusk for kilometers and bats in the lavender sky,

      like spiders when a fly is caught, began to appear.

      And there, not the promised land but barbwire and barbwire

      with nothing growing under it. I tried to fly that dusk

      after a bat said la sangre del saguaro nos seduce. Sometimes

      I wake and my throat is dry, so I drive to botanical gardens

      to search for red fruits at the top of saguaros, the ones

      at dusk I threw rocks at for the sake of hunger.

      But I never find them here. These bats speak English only.

      Sometimes in my car, that viscous red syrup

      clings to my throat and I have to pull over —

      I also scraped needles first, then carved

      those tall torsos for water, then spotlights drove me

      and thirty others dashing into paloverdes;

      green-striped trucks surrounded us and our empty bottles

      rattled. When the trucks left, a cold cell swallowed us.

       from The Book I Made with a Counselor My First Week of School

      His grandma made the best pupusas, the counselor wrote next to

      Stick-Figure Abuelita

      (I’d colored her puffy hair black with a pen).

      Earlier, Dad in his truck: “always look gringos in the eyes.”

      Mom: “never tell them everything, but smile, always smile.”

      A handful of times I’ve opened the book to see running past cacti

      from helicopters, running inside detention cells.

      Next to what might be yucca plants or a dried creek:

       Javier saw a dead coyote animal, which stank and had flies over it.

      I keep this book in an old shoebox underneath the bed. She asked in Spanish,

      I just smiled, didn’t tell her, no animal, I knew that man.

       Second Attempt Crossing

      for Chino

      In the middle of that desert that didn’t look like sand

      and sand only,

      in the middle of those acacias, whiptails, and coyotes, someone yelled

      “¡La Migra!” and everyone ran.

      In that dried creek where forty of us slept, we turned to each other,

      and you flew from my side in the dirt.

      Black-throated sparrows and dawn

      hitting the tops of mesquites.

      Against the herd of legs,

      you sprinted back toward me,

      I jumped on your shoulders,

      and we ran from the white trucks, then their guns.

      I said, “freeze Chino, ¡pará por favor!”

      So I wouldn’t touch their legs that kicked you,

      you pushed me under your chest,

      and I’ve never thanked you.

      Beautiful Chino —

      the only name I know to call you by —

      farewell your tattooed chest: the M,

      the S, the 13. Farewell

      the phone number you gave me

      when you went east to Virginia,

      and I went west to San Francisco.

      You called twice a month,

      then your cousin said the gang you ran from

      in San Salvador

      found you in Alexandria. Farewell

      your brown arms that shielded me then,

      that shield me now, from La Migra.

       El Salvador

      Salvador, if I return on a summer day, so humid my thumb

      will clean your beard of salt, and if I touch your volcanic face,

      kiss your pumice breath,

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