Search All Winners

I live brokenly and assemble together

Weakly – from long bone of the arm, hip

Rollicking in its socket, and the jaw,

Its brux. From the lip of a wooden

Bowl carved from the knot of a limb

Drifted, my name was given on water

And laid down like hail upon my tongue.

It’s become a bewilderment of white –

It snows. It does snow. It is snowing.

but we are still at sea     we climbed into the rocking

boat again     the things that we could not afford

to remember in the vernacular      

                                                                       sun

                                                            sinking backwards into the world’s

                                                            light industry    Eros in idle hands

VERA: Have I told you about the lesbian who tried to seduce / me?

EMMA: Yes.

VERA: She showed up at the house, saying she has suck a big, whaddayacallit.

EMMA: Clitoris.

VERA: Clitoris, right, and she said it would be terrific, and all that. And I said no thank you, and she went away. Nice woman. Very pretty, actually.

Any time Manny wanted to sell a gun or a big load of weed he’d hand the deal over to one of his main boys. Manny called Chico, Beto, and Paco, then Chevy and Rafa, his right hands cause they was ready to slice open an enemy or blood up a buyer that didn’t pay up, and so they got the juiciest sheep and the most money. Got the most room on the street. The rest of the Lobos was just taggers or third-raters. Tagger babies are the locos who sprayed our sets all over town so people know we own it. They’d dog around here with their spray paint cans and their fake-tough faces, bragging how they did a job up on the freeway signs or almost got busted by the police for messing up a mural. “Hey, homes!” they’d laugh out to each other. “You see the job I did? Got up twenty feet that time!”

LOCAS © 1997 by Yxta Maya Murray; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.

I do not know how I need the air,

or if it needs me. The lost air,

the air which is smashed, like a red hat.

When the sun rises the amnesty

of the unused animals – the goat, the burrow,

the maroon horses - when the sun rises

the amnesty of these flies its flag: an orchard

with a thumb on top.

I had a husband. He was alive and I was yelling at him from upstairs, yelling downstairs, yelling, Ray! I can’t find them! They’re not here! And my husband did not answer, which annoyed me, because he frequently did not answer my questions or my calls in the way that the people you spend the most time around often do not feel obliged to do. I yelled down the stairs some more, and then I walked down the stairs and I saw him, with his head kind of bent to the side on his left shoulder and his legs straight and turned out and his arms draped over the sides of the easy chair as if the easy chair were a piece of clothing and he was wearing it like a cape. His eyes were closed and his mouth was slack. I walked up to him and yelled at him, which is when I realized that there was another reason he was not answering me, and so I shook him, which did nothing but move him, slightly. He was a big man, with big hands and freckles all across his face, and some white hair left on the top of his head. He was very handsome.