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Jon Pineda
RETURN
1.
We found ourselves gone
into the crowd on Bourbon
Street, a river with its current
of tourists breaking the invisible
levees until certain things drew
us in, someone’s wife undressed
among college students quick to
drape camera flashes across her skin,
and the man struggling to cover her
with his wrinkled suit coat
is her sad husband, you imagine.
His smile appears only an apology.
It is almost January, and the wind
lingering in the distant marsh grass
gathers to speak its name over
the woman’s nipples sharpening
while people nearby disappear
into themselves, an easier descent
among the alleyways lining the empty
church, its rusted grates meshed
with the stench of piss and blood,
and how we all emerged then into
Jackson Square, the Baby about to drop
and signal the end of one year,
the beginning of another. Finding
your spot within the crowd, your hand
holding onto your wife’s, you find
there is always a hint of sadness
that hangs back from any considerable joy
and waits, your mother’s sure words like
a prayer through life, “Remember laughter
turns to crying.” Before the hour
slides into place, you decide you will cherish
the temporal, holding onto each other’s face
to steady yourselves before the embrace
of the moment passes on. You enjoy
a kiss among the crowd of others
cheering through jazz and blues,
drunk on Hurricanes.
2.
Outside, in the sun, a Louisiana winter
hums within bristled palms, you overhear
someone a table away say “Filipino Necktie”
and swipe a single fingertip across their throat.
Others among them laugh, and it is gruesome,
you think, how silence then follows.
It settles over the food set before them.
A woman’s slim fingers slide over the neck
of an opened bottle, which she struggles
with a few jolts to release the ketchup,
its dimpled redness spills onto her plate
of fries and catfish, and when you return
to the conversation, among your friends,
they are smiling casually in their hunger
to be understood, the lull having gathered
about you all, you want to tell them a story
about your father, one he’d waited until
you were grown to inherit, how,
when he was young, stationed in Norfolk,
a few of the Filipinos from his ship would
spend weekends at a dancehall in Oceanview,
and many times over, the nights would end
with white sailors starting fights with them,
those young Filipinos in their custom-
made Hong Kong suits, slick as snakeskin,
their black hair primed with pomade,
they had to know they were dangerous
for girls would come those nights wanting
only to dance with them and so, one night,
my father says, before the dance, those young
Filipinos fashioned thick chainlinks around
their necks, under silk shirts, metal pressed
heavily against their skin and covered
marks left by a mother’s rosary. When
the white sailors cut in with their worn routine
of violence, my father says, smiling, as if
he wasn’t there, those Filipinos pulled off
their chains and began swinging them at the other
sailors’ legs, the music then had stopped
and the only sound it seemed to him
was the popping of bone into the void
where faces of those girls, wide-eyed,
have long since vanished.
3.
Then to disappear into a crowd
of waves, the current pulls
at your arms, trying to quiet you,
hoping you’ll settle into its sleep,
you raise your head into sunlight,
catch your breath before going
under, the water having its way
with you, only twelve years old,
until struggling again, you find
it is easier to let go of any dreams
and simply float among the dead
moments of hope—though it just so
happens you are brought back,
summoned to a part of the Outer
Banks, a lifeguard at the end
of a human chain started by some-
one who waded out into the surf
crashing while, one by one, on-
lookers joined together to form
this link, to hold the lifeguard
who grabbed you by the throat,
pulling you toward him where
you sink back now knowing
it will be all right, this isn’t
the end.
©
Jon Pineda 2007 |
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