Floaters Read online

  Floaters

  POEMS

  Martín Espada

  W.W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  Dedicated to Lauren Marie Espada

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  I. Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge

  Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge

  Floaters

  Ode to the Soccer Ball Sailing Over a Barbed-Wire Fence

  Not for Him the Fiery Lake of the False Prophet

  Boxer Wears America 1st Shorts in Bout With Mexican, Finishes Second

  Mazen Sleeps With His Foot on the Floor

  I Now Pronounce You Dead

  II. Asking Questions of the Moon

  The Story of How We Came to América

  Why I Wait for the Soggy Tarantula of Spinach

  The Stoplight at the Corner Where Somebody Had to Die

  Death Rides the Elevator in Brooklyn

  The Cannon on the Hood of My Father’s Car

  Asking Questions of the Moon

  Standing on the Bridge at Dolceacqua

  III. Love Song of the Kraken

  Aubade With Concussion

  I Would Steal a Car for You

  That We Will Sing

  Love Song of the Kraken

  Love Song of the Galápagos Tortoise

  Love is a Luminous Insect at the Window

  Insulting the Prince

  The Assassination of the Landlord’s Purple Vintage 1976 Monte Carlo

  IV. Morir Soñando

  Remake of Me the Sickle for Thy Grain

  Be There When They Swarm Me

  The Bard Shakes the Snow From the Trees

  Flan

  Morir Soñando

  The Five Horses of Doctor Ramón Emeterio Betances

  Letter to My Father

  Note on the Cover Photograph

  Notes on the Poems

  I.

  Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge

  Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge

  I close my eyes and see him windmilling his arms as he plummets from

  the Mystic Tobin Bridge, to prove me wrong, to show me he was good,

  to atone for sins like seeds in the lopsided apple of his heart, but mostly

  to escape from me in the back of his cab, a Puerto Rican lawyer in a suit and tie.

  I hated the 111 bus, sweltering in my suit and tie with the crowd in the aisle,

  waiting to hit a bump on the Mystic Tobin Bridge so my head would finally

  burst through the ceiling like a giraffe on a circus train. I hated the 111 bus

  after eviction day in Chelsea District Court, translating the landlords and judges

  into Spanish so the tenants knew they had to stuff their clothing into garbage

  bags and steal away again, away from the 40-watt squint that followed them

  everywhere, that followed me because I stood beside them in court. I would

  daydream in the humidity of the bus, a basketball hero, flipping the balled-up

  pages of the law into the wastebasket at the office as the legal aid lawyers

  chanted my name. I hated the 111 bus. I had to take a taxicab that day.

  What the hell you doing here? said the driver of the cab to me in my suit

  and tie. You gotta be careful in this neighborhood. There’s a lotta Josés

  around here. The driver’s great-grandfather staggered off a boat so his

  great-grandson could one day drive me across the Mystic Tobin Bridge,

  but there was no room in the taxi for chalk and a blackboard. He could

  hear the sawing of my breath as I leaned into his ear, past the bulletproof

  barricade somehow missing, and said: I’m a José. I could see the 40-watt

  squint in his rearview mirror. I’m Puerto Rican, I said. It was exactly

  5 PM, and we were stuck in traffic in a taxi on the Mystic Tobin Bridge.

  The driver stammered his own West Side Story without the ballet,

  how a Puerto Rican gang stole his cousin’s wallet years ago. You think

  I’m gonna rob you? I said, in my suit and tie, close enough now to tickle

  his ear with the mouth of a revolver. I could hear the sawing of his breath.

  He still wanted to know what I was doing there. I’m a lawyer. I go to court

  with all the Josés, I said. Stalled traffic steamed around us, the breath

  of cattle in the winter air. Where you going for the holidays? the driver said.

  I thought about Christmas Eve in court, eviction orders flying from the judge’s

  bench when tenants without legal aid lawyers, or children old enough to translate

  the English of the summons, did not answer to their names. Every year, the legal

  aid lawyers told the joke about The Christmas Defense: Your Honor, it’s Christmas!

  I said to the driver: I will be spending Christmas right here with my fellow Josés.

  The driver shouted: What do you want me to do? Get out of this cab and jump off

  the bridge? We both knew what he meant. We both knew about Chuck Stuart,

  the last man to jump off the Mystic Tobin Bridge. Everybody knew how Chuck

  drove his wife to Mission Hill after birthing classes, the flash and pop in the dark

  when he shot her in the head and himself in the belly. Everybody knew how

  he conjured a Black carjacker on the crackling call to 911 the way the Mercury

  Theater on the Air conjured Martians in New Jersey on the radio half a century

  before. Everybody knew how a hundred cops pounded on door after door

  in the projects of Mission Hill, locking a Black man in a cage for the world to see

  like the last of his tribe on exhibit at the World’s Fair. Everybody knew how

  Chuck would have escaped, cashing the insurance check to drive away with

  a new Nissan, but for his brother’s confession, the accomplice throwing

  the Gucci bag with makeup, the wedding rings and the gun off the Dizzy Bridge

  in Revere. Everybody knew how Chuck parked his new car on the lower deck,

  left a note and launched himself deep into the black water, how the cops

  hauled his body from the river by lunchtime, when I walked into the office

  to tell the secretary: Chuck Stuart just jumped off the Mystic Tobin Bridge.

  I said nothing to the driver. I almost nodded yes in the rearview mirror. I confess,

  for a flash, I wanted him to jump. The driver, the cops, the landlords, the judges

  all wanted us to jump off the Mystic Tobin Bridge, all wanted us to sprout gills

  like movie monsters so we could paddle underwater back to the islands, down

  into the weeds and mud at the bottom, past the fish-plucked rib cages of the dead,

  the rusty revolvers of a thousand crimes unsolved, the wedding rings of marriages

  gone bad, till we washed up onshore in a tangle of seaweed, gasping for air.

  Last night, still more landed here, clothing stuffed in garbage bags, to flee the god

  of hurricanes flinging their houses into the sky or the god of hunger slipping

  his knife between the ribs, not a dark tide like the tide of the Mystic River, but

  builders of bridges. You can walk across the bridges they build. Or you can jump.

  Floaters

  Ok, I’m gonna go ahead and ask . . . have ya’ll ever seen floaters this clean. I’m not trying to be an a$$ but I HAVE NEVER SEEN FLOATERS LIKE THIS, could this be another edited photo. We’ve all seen the dems and liberal parties do some pretty sick things. —ANONYMOUS POST, “I’M 10-15” BORDER PATROL FACEBOOK GROUP

  Like a beer bottle thr
own into the river by a boy too drunk to cry,

  like the shard of a Styrofoam cup drained of coffee brown as the river,

  like the plank of a fishing boat broken in half by the river, the dead float.

  And the dead have a name: floaters, say the men of the Border Patrol,

  keeping watch all night by the river, hearts pumping coffee as they say

  the word floaters, soft as a bubble, hard as a shoe as it nudges the body,

  to see if it breathes, to see if it moans, to see if it sits up and speaks.

  And the dead have names, a feast day parade of names, names that

  dress all in red, names that twirl skirts, names that blow whistles,

  names that shake rattles, names that sing in praise of the saints:

  Say Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez. Say Angie Valeria Martínez Ávalos.

  See how they rise off the tongue, the calling of bird to bird somewhere

  in the trees above our heads, trilling in the dark heart of the leaves.

  Say what we know of them now they are dead: Óscar slapped dough

  for pizza with oven-blistered fingers. Daughter Valeria sang, banging

  a toy guitar. He slipped free of the apron he wore in the blast of the oven,

  sold the motorcycle he would kick till it sputtered to life, counted off

  pesos for the journey across the river, and the last of his twenty-five

  years, and the last of her twenty-three months. There is another name

  that beats its wings in the heart of the trees: Say Tania Vanessa Ávalos,

  Óscar’s wife and Valeria’s mother, the witness stumbling along the river.

  Now their names rise off her tongue: Say Óscar y Valeria. He swam

  from Matamoros across to Brownsville, the girl slung around his neck,

  stood her in the weeds on the Texas side of the river, swore to return

  with her mother in hand, turning his back as fathers do who later say:

  I turned around and she was gone. In the time it takes for a bird to hop

  from branch to branch, Valeria jumped in the river after her father.

  Maybe he called out her name as he swept her up from the river;

  maybe the river drowned out his voice as the water swept them away.

  Tania called out the names of the saints, but the saints drowsed

  in the stupor of birds in the dark, their cages covered with blankets.

  The men on patrol would never hear their pleas for asylum, watching

  for floaters, hearts pumping coffee all night on the Texas side of the river.

  No one, they say, had ever seen floaters this clean: Óscar’s black shirt

  yanked up to the armpits, Valeria’s arm slung around her father’s

  neck even after the light left her eyes, both face down in the weeds,

  back on the Mexican side of the river. Another edited photo: See how

  her head disappears in his shirt, the waterlogged diaper bunched

  in her pants, the blue of the blue cans. The radio warned us about

  the crisis actors we see at one school shooting after another; the man

  called Óscar will breathe, sit up, speak, tug the black shirt over

  his head, shower off the mud and shake hands with the photographer.

  Yet, the floaters did not float down the Río Grande like Olympians

  showing off the backstroke, nor did their souls float up to Dallas,

  land of rumored jobs and a president shot in the head as he waved

  from his motorcade. No bubbles rose from their breath in the mud,

  light as the iridescent circles of soap that would fascinate a two-year-old.

  And the dead still have names, names that sing in praise of the saints,

  names that flower in blossoms of white, a cortege of names dressed

  all in black, trailing the coffins to the cemetery. Carve their names

  in headlines and gravestones they would never know in the kitchens

  of this cacophonous world. Enter their names in the book of names.

  Say Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez; say Angie Valeria Martínez Ávalos.

  Bury them in a corner of the cemetery named for the sainted archbishop

  of the poor, shot in the heart saying mass, bullets bought by the taxes

  I paid when I worked as a bouncer and fractured my hand forty years

  ago, and bumper stickers read: El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam.

  When the last bubble of breath escapes the body, may the men

  who speak of floaters, who have never seen floaters this clean,

  float through the clouds to the heavens, where they paddle the air

  as they wait for the saint who flips through the keys on his ring

  like a drowsy janitor, till he fingers the key that turns the lock and shuts

  the gate on their babble-tongued faces, and they plunge back to earth,

  a shower of hailstones pelting the river, the Mexican side of the river.

  Ode to the Soccer Ball Sailing Over a Barbed-Wire Fence

  Tornillo . . . has become the symbol of what may be the largest U.S. mass detention of children not charged with crimes since the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans.— ROBERT MOORE, TEXAS MONTHLY

  Praise Tornillo: word for screw in Spanish, word for jailer in English,

  word for three thousand adolescent migrants incarcerated in camp.

  Praise the three thousand soccer balls gift-wrapped at Christmas,

  as if raindrops in the desert inflated and bounced through the door.

  Praise the soccer games rotating with a whistle every twenty minutes,

  so three thousand adolescent migrants could take turns kicking a ball.

  Praise the boys and girls who walked a thousand miles, blood caked

  in their toes, yelling in Spanish and a dozen Mayan tongues on the field.

  Praise the first teenager, brain ablaze like chili pepper Christmas lights,

  to kick a soccer ball high over the chain-link and barbed-wire fence.

  Praise the first teenager to scrawl a name and number on the face

  of the ball, then boot it all the way to the dirt road on the other side.

  Praise the smirk of teenagers at the jailers scooping up fugitive

  soccer balls, jabbering about the ingratitude of teenagers at Christmas.

  Praise the soccer ball sailing over the barbed-wire fence, white

  and black like the moon, yellow like the sun, blue like the world.

  Praise the soccer ball flying to the moon, flying to the sun, flying to other

  worlds, flying to Antigua Guatemala, where Starbucks buys coffee beans.

  Praise the soccer ball bounding off the lawn at the White House,

  thudding off the president’s head as he waves to absolutely no one.

  Praise the piñata of the president’s head, jellybeans pouring from his ears,

  enough to feed three thousand adolescents incarcerated at Tornillo.

  Praise Tornillo: word in Spanish for adolescent migrant internment camp,

  abandoned by jailers in the desert, liberated by a blizzard of soccer balls.

  Not for Him the Fiery Lake of the False Prophet

  When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. . . . They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. —DONALD TRUMP, JUNE 16, 2015

  They woke him up by pissing in his face. He opened his mouth

  to scream in Spanish, so his mouth became a urinal at the ballpark.

  Scott and Steve: the Leader brothers, celebrating a night at Fenway,

  where the Sox beat the Indians and a rookie named Rodríguez spun

  the seams on his changeup to hypnotize the Tribe. Later that night,

  Steve urinated on the door of his cell, and Scott told the cops why

  they did it: Donald Trump was right. All these illegals need to be deported.


  He was a Mexican in a sleeping bag outside JFK station on a night

  in August, so they called him a wetback and emptied their bladders

  in his hair. In court, the lawyers spoke his name: Guillermo Rodríguez,

  immigrant with papers, crop-picker in the fields, trader of bottles

  and cans collected in his cart. Two strangers squashed the cartilage

  in his nose like a can drained of beer. In dreams, he would remember

  the shoes digging into his rib cage, the pole raked repeatedly across

  his cheekbones and upraised knuckles, the high-five over his body.

  Donald Trump was right, said Scott. And Trump said: The people

  that are following me are very passionate. His hands fluttered

  as he spoke, a demagogue’s hands, no blood under the fingernails,

  no whiff of urine to scrub away. He would orchestrate the chant

  of Build that Wall at rally after rally, bellowing till the blood rushed

  to his face, red as a demagogue in the grip of masturbatory dreams:

  a tribute to the new conquistador, the Wall raised up by Mexican hands,

  Mexican hair and fingernails bristling in the brick, Mexican blood

  swirling in the cement like raspberry syrup on a vanilla sundae.

  On the Cinco de Mayo, he leered over a taco bowl at Trump Tower.

  Not for him the fiery lake of the false prophet, reddening

  his ruddy face. Not for him the devils of Puritan imagination,

  shrieking in a foreign tongue and climbing in the window

  like the immigrant demons he conjures for the crowd.

  Not even for him ten thousand years of the Leader brothers,

  streaming a fountain of piss in his face as he sputters forever.

  For him, Hell is a country where the man in a hard hat

  paving the road to JFK station sees Guillermo and dials 911;

  Hell is a country where EMTs kneel to wrap a blanket around

  the shivering shoulders of Guillermo and wipe his face clean;

  Hell is a country where the nurse at the emergency room

  hangs a morphine drip for Guillermo, so he can go back to sleep.

  Two thousand miles away, someone leaves a trail of water bottles