We are all picassos

We are all Picassos.

Todas y todos somos picassos.

My DNA is digital

my besos are analogue

I spin through space

two eyes here

two mouths there

the mother displaced, distorted, missing in Michigan 

the father invisible, drowned,

dismembered on the canvas of fertile grandmothers

I arrived piece by piece across the migrant spectrum of soul

I will be buried and the earth will be whole again and again

My fate is twisted, a twister, a storm of tenderness

My days are here with you

My nights become DNA,

I spin and float reassemble

myself in your bodies

I ghost other worlds

parallel soul parking

fitting carefully between two bodies

My love is DNA

my hate is analogue

Borderless not wireless

My head leans against the head of Coatlicue

My ears are pounded by the drumming

of wars plummeting through my skin

We are all artists

our tongues the brush

our veins the palette of colors

the rio bravo pleading to jump tracks

and wash herself of the maquiladora blood

Picasso made flesh offerings for our eyes to see

Guadalupe buried our placenta in her cries

Today is the day I will eat prickly pears with lemon and chile

smile against the sun

know that everything and everyone I love

will burst from my pores and my senses will make clouds

free the rain from the prison of pipes, asphalt and dams

Two or three more world wars

Ten, twenty, thirty revolutions

Where we disarm the men with guns and pigmentation

we'll get it right

we'll figure out how to be together

dance and not damn ourselves together

Wind 

Water

Land 

Our bodies return whole to the spiderweb,

gently feed the cosmos...

[Poema 19] Socorro

Our mother
is wailing
her anger is choking her
she raises her face into the night
Her tears rain up into the darkness
Manuela is on the front step,
the only step of our home,
she is crying, wailing
the neighbors turn off their porch lights
the houses all around become shadows under the trees
Her husband
is in the back room
a tiny room that has a stove, a refrigerator, a counter
and room for one to stand and another to pass by.
José,
he is drinking black, cold coffee
his sun-beaten face,
his hands and skin
toughened as a bracero
etched in migrant seasons
bronced in the fields
joins Manuela,
who is crying just like the night
Socorro eloped with Francisco.

Coco tells me Manuela and Jose have visited her
over and over the last few weeks.
They ask her what she wants.
She says: Make me some frijolitos like before.
That's all I want.

Socorro does not hear the cries of her mother and father
In between sobs
they tell their gods
not to bring her to them yet.
Manuela wails and wails, she must live longer than me
she must see her great grandchildren be born
José holds Manuela at last by the shoulders,
puts his arms around the viejita
rubs his stubbled face against her neck and earrings
His breath and clothes smell of a Camel cigarrette
an aroma that only a farm-worker
can make into a memory of meals and laughter
after the long day in the fields.
Manuela stops crying
José is now whole again
They sit by Coco's bedside
and wait, listening to her breathing and dry her tears.