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gets caught with this

      because I took it from my grandfather’s tools.

      . . .

      To shoot someone we needed a gun;

      Albert said he could get a pistol but we needed a car.

      That’s how, at midnight, on a Tuesday,

      we strolled down the street with a dent puller

      trying to murder a man.

      Not wanting to steal a car

      from our neighborhood,

      we take alleys we shouldn’t,

      until cops chase us across

      eight lanes of freeway and backyards.

      To get away, I ran in a canyon

      and a field of cactus.

      The needles ripped my clothes,

      left spiked fruit behind my knee;

      with a knife wet under a garden hose,

      I cut away skin and spines.

      With arms around my boys’ shoulders

      we walk home, but only I see god.

      It was the Lord from his La Jollan gates,

      the big white man in the sky hollered at me.

      In pale distance and omniscient beard,

      in sky clouded with open azure:

      No murder this night for you,

      nor any night for you,

      only a hot bath and plate of papas fritas

      from a grandmother’s hands

      and four hours of needles

      shooting from the skin

      and holding the faucet like a gun.

       2.

      Yes, families are supposed to be circuses.

      Accept it, and accept that the acrobat’s taffy

      of satin will twirl, and the bears in tutus will spin

      over the exposes in the warped wood

      and cracks in the waxy linoleum,

      all the while your grandfather will yell

       You no like it, go in the canyon and eat tomatoes.

      Avoid his boots from under the Mercury Marquis.

      Accept your aunt, the invisible lady, naked in the yard,

      mustached and fat, fixing her car’s transmission

      by sanding moons on the body at night.

      Listen to your cousin make beats

      and let his sister teach you the “Dougie”

      while their mother juggles meth and late rent fees.

      Accept it. There is knife throwing with your uncles.

      Children run the streets yelling while you drink soda

      from a straw in a sandwich bag, and watch

      morning jump through a flaming hoop

      to avoid the insult of a whip. Afternoon

      stands on her hind legs and opens wide, showing

      missing teeth. Accept that night stays in his cage.

      Remember all that you see. Memory is a fist to the eye.

       3.

      Some run away with the circus;

      I ran away with the canyon,

      where there were no tomatoes.

      Nothing suns the canyon floor

      or grows along the freeway but trash,

      no overgrowth of eucalyptus and elm,

      frayed palm trees, or mangled brush

      to shade the snagging of teenager’s

      bruised lips in braces. No secret trail

      leads to foyers and dens furnished

      with broken box springs and books

      without tables. This beach

      of rocks is where furniture

      and mattresses swim to die.

      Freeway on one side, backyards treed

      with barbeques and sheds on the other,

      the canyon flourishes with cenotaphs

      of reddened tin and grey wood.

      With nothing but time, crops

      of bottles and chicken bones,

      thrown from the freeway,

      stretch upward restlessly

      in the six by nine of sun.

       4.

      When ice cream was

      the only bribe needed

      to tell my grandmother

      my cousins walked

      the canyons to meet

      with their boyfriends,

      I should have asked

      for a soda, too.

      When I leaned against a fence,

      playing with a chicken bone

      breaking with cracks from the sun,

      when only me and a recliner’s bones

      or the bleached skull of a plastic bag

      could be seen, I could’ve

      panted in some heat, too.

      At nine, I had no language for lonely,

      but could watch cars swim laps forever.

      The fence shared a common tongue,

      but had no place to go,

      if it no longer liked where

      it lived, could not move

      to my neighborhood,

      where we were

      racist neighbors,

      suspicious of strange fences,

      where cars piled in our dirt yard,

      and no one listened to the pink

      seat of a swing as it licked

      the ground with only one chain.

       5.

      I was two

      in a ruffled blue tuxedo

      when Donna Thomas

      and David Martinez

      exchanged vows

      and traded rings.

      In a decade

      their marriage misfired,

      their hearts stopped

      spinning and roses

      rising from vases

      slouched.

      My grandmother grew

      roses and cactus

      on the side of her house;

      in a front yard of dirt

      grew half-sanded cars

      blooming with Bondo.

      On

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