Homework

Heatstroke


Land of Enchantment:
faded zia symbols with hard sharp rays.
The sun showed up whole,
reflected itself on windshields and bits of broken bottles,
dried up the river, bleached the sky.

That summer everyone said they were quitting –
one last deal and that was it.
The overhead light in someone’s kitchen was moon yellow
as the valium we needed if we ever wanted to sleep.
A june bug circled that light
over and over. The crack of its wings.

The friend of a friend quit first, hanged
himself in the hot garage of the bachelor rental house.
A bunch of dealers with kilos of pot wrapped in the Juarez
newspaper, stacked up to the ceiling.

I leaned casually against the wall next to their guns.
The bass of the stereo thumped hard like my pulse,
while they broke up the kilos and stepped on them,
and then weighed them again and bagged it all up to sell.

Sometimes long black hairs were tangled up in the pot
I took a single hair and wound it around a cross
of two dried stems. Ojo de dios,
eye of god. A rope wrapped over a beam.

State Fair: Tilt-a-whirl, try your luck, chicas.
We twitched up and down the midway
in halter tops, cut-offs and flip-flops
the taste of cotton candy,
dust and stolen cigarettes.
Old rock songs blared like a dare on the rides.
The feeling of our bare brown legs walking past

I dropped acid with another bored friend on a Monday night.
We wandered down a concrete arroyo
until heat lightning convinced us of a flash flood,
so we climbed out laughing, barefooted,
ran from rain that was miles away
crossed the still-warm street
to an empty parking lot. Pavement rolled
out to the horizon.

We sat on a curb until the sun showed up the way
it always did, behind our backs.
But we could hear its yellow hit the million shards of glass
mixed into the concrete all around us.
People drove by, squinting in the sun on their way to work.
Our shadows led us back across the busy street.

That summer everyone said they were quitting
but didn’t,
red blue red tilt-a-whirl police cars outside,
before the handcuffs and sentences
as pallbearers.
The shiny hearse floated in its mirage.

That summer, sunburned at the Golden Inn,
someone pretending to barbecue, charcoal haze.
So high I lost my shoe in the middle of the day,
just one, not two.
I was lucky, I
stepped out of it and walked away



M. R. Truscott (c) 2007