.
6 January 2025
Anyway what is the story of the Mexican bachelor’s
Barbie dream house, and why is it here, among the severed hoofs
with leather whips or are those tassels, the gasoline jack hammer,
the Christmas town? We were living on the street
of my dreams! I hadn’t known that was the street
of my dreams. Murals on the cobblestones. Every window
its ribbons, its plants, its faint floral curtain askew.
Now we are in Callejón de Gallitos, this is a thing
you don’t learn when you find your home on Facebook.
The rooster that I chided myself for thinking
was right under our window, which is two doors,
when I woke, middle of the night, melatonin, mezcal
is indeed: under our window, across a neighbor’s
dope jardín of a roof, and there are six cages of cocks
in one row, six below, and look, around the corner,
there are more. But whatever? I stealth composted
the entire cantaloupe rind. Bess continues to be kind.
She took her comb, the blue one, the one with a dog on it,
she said, and began to work out the gnarls on the coat
of Conqui, the neighbor’s little dog, who leaned in for it,
loved it, was half restored to happy cloud. There goes another
sonic boom, a fire, an accordion player, a parade, the people
in this city will not stop partying for the reyes,
the learned ones, who followed the star, perhaps
they were Zoroastrians, the three, weary, adoring,
warned in a dream not to return to Herod, and so
they went home by a different way.
.
12 January
Dolores Hidalgo, man
this place is chill, every
body eating ice cream, that
boy sings before them, his
biz, vulnerable busking, the band
lines up in the plaza, wears
purple, plays kazoos, arms
up, arms down, to keep it quiet
now kazoos! Out comes
a dead man, we hadn’t
known, in his coffin, how they
heft it, then his picture, big
and heavy, in its frame. The band
salutes. Horns up. The drums
stitch, sew. That church
was full. The horns go, go. Oh
that every young dead man
would get a band.
.
14 January
We walk through town, past the little coffin store,
the street-side lingerie, the two blind
singers, the pots-and-pans, the guasana cart,
the noble domed kiosco with its papel picado,
to a park that reminds me of the sort you find
if you drive to Amarillo, by way of Oklahoma,
and stop in one of the towns that are mostly now grain
elevator, gone. The ground is dirt and trash. A half-
folded carnival in the middle. Lucy and Bess run laps
on the not-quite-regulation track between the carnies’
motorhomes. Are carnies gypsies? Josephine asks. Thinking
of The Family Under the Bridge. Yes, I say. Something
like that. Or nomads for jobs? There’s a little dog, tethered
to a truck. Agritos, agave. At night Franny says
I miss my bed, I miss your bed. I miss Mercy.
I want to hug her. I’m sorry, I say. That’s not
a good feeling is it? Shall we finish The Golden Key?
Tangle throws herself in, there is no other way.
Mossy finds the Man of the Sea. “He fought the wind,
and climbed the waves, and went on towards the rainbow.”
.
17 January
The doctor will be one hour late
We try and fail to make it to the gardens of the mansion
that must be somewhere in this suburb. We happen upon
a play kingdom, built in the 1970s, past a closed tienda,
gone to seed. This might be a crash pad, a government building,
someone is playing banda, here are some see-saws, a gorgeous,
dry fountain, that was, perhaps, a pool? There are six steep slides
in one structure! The metal was painted blue and pink and lavender
and green and orange and yellow and white. Now it is sunspots, lichen,
the confetti of an age. That wall’s tagged up, here is some trash
A lone woman rests on the built-in bleachers. Noble
trees wait for children, where are the children, and cuales
tus nombres those trees. We walk to the clinic, the girls
like its scrubbed-clean spaces, its sheen of hygienic + new
The doctor has four beautiful names, and the first is Norberto
He gives me a pink fleece GAP blanket to wear, in lieu of pants
Franny wants to take care of me, Franny wants to come too
She tucks the blanket in at my waist
The doctor speaks Spanish, I lean on cognates and eye contact,
Nico translates a story about Argentinians (ha ha/guau
they are snobs). The doctor feels the place where bone
hits bones, shows me, on his model: that’s bone
+ bone. You do not want to do the treatment you think
you do. He Googles a surgery, shows us its steps. I try
and fail to call my mom. I buy the girls hospital Jell-O,
and 2/4 of them lose their minds. I buy myself hospital flan
and think of Atoo. She could cure whatever ailed us
with boiled custard. Mono, flu, a v bad mood: she’d make a whole
pitcher and bring it over. Or a stiff hot toddy for a cold,
a tablespoon of coke syrup for the stomach
She wasn’t wrong, my matriarch, gone to seed + to God
Coke syrup settles the stomach
.
20 January
The asshole inspiration for Biff Tannen’s character in
Back to the Future II is back
and he’s the president
<3 from Mercy's heart to Franny!