?“For I have seen the shadow that has thrust itself upon the cerveza bars and fluorescent gas lights and known it is he:
whose feet crackle the palm leaves and are made from ivory and hemp with nails like black elephants,
whose suit is covered in bolshevik dust and pressed by men with accordion smiles who wreathe him in roses and trumpets,
whose newspapers shout praise in monochromatic joy,
who swathed the crumbled walls in grey to coat el dia de los muertos with the ash of volcanoes,
who wears a monocle caulked with blood over a glass eye and a bowler hat and whose cane pierced the madonna desert and drew black gold,
who whispered over the metallic roar and the urchin of our fists: ‘te hemos dado pan.’


“Or the mother who sat in cardboard cathedrals with children who would not come forth,
who stood with crypt suzettes under gin lamps for men with no faces to scream at them in the alley,
who read de beauvoir like a yoyo besides the fountains of duchamp,
who struts in shattered sequin stilettos and chemically carved hair and cherry slurs for lips to be hurled into the river with a rosary around her waist,
whose hands without arms erupt like obelisks out of the madonna desert and whose face without eyes swells in self-loathing
who is the faded quetzcoatl of the laundromats,
who reached into the stifled chokes of our blood and whispered: ‘yo tuve un nino.’



“And he is the one who allows the bass to ooze like syrup from the ceiling inside the room where his mother drenched the shards in his feet with lye,
and coarse heroines puncture constellations into his waists and are never satisfied,
and his mouth is the fork of the river where veins and mescal converge,
and his arms descend like alveoli to imbibe the jazz blurred like a remote howl from the sawdust-strewn rooms that he owns,
and his name is spat between shreds of tobacco inside ammoniac teeth into the swallowing dirt:
and you, you ignorant people, you expect to be purified.”