My father’s name is Adam.  As in apple, the core stuck to a throat halfway, jutting seed.
This is the middle name that the business world has no whereabouts of. It was bestowed upon
him, this name, I imagine like all things; deliberately searching the scaffolds of the bible with apprehensive sweat trickling through brown sugar colored foreheads. However there’s nothing
biblical about this man. He has six children, the most unlucky of all numbers.
Thus, I have 5 half-siblings. Each with identically strange sunken eyes and tired skin.
The same kind of shared headache. Like being submerged for too long. Like too many mistakes and too little oxygen.
I am unlucky number 6. An omen-child. Not the settling of dust but of the silent movement before
it was ever frazzled by frantic feet. The calm you don’t want to realize exists.
3 daughters and 3 sons because he was compulsively articulate and clean; a nasty habit of OCD that was coddled by the women that washed their hands twice and bit their nails until they bled.
You see, I never speak of them because they do not speak of me.
Memory is tricky. Sometimes you remember the smell of fried pork in hands that have known hard
labor and other times you recall perfectly the pirated DVD’s sold for a dollar down the street of your neighbor’s apartment. The distorted graphics on the front, the headline in Spanish and despite how many people are there buying these illegally distributed films you wonder why you feel ashamed and embarrassed when you tell your friends, if you tell your friends but you don’t.
I know of their existence, of where they are located and could be found easily, their names and what they do but if one was to ask me, I would not know their personalities, how they react to bad news or if they are fulfilled, whether they know that our psychological genetics are cloudy and erratic and that is why Sundays always feel sacrilegious. They are faces in a picture that I never had a need to frame.
Despite having the same father, we do not call the same man, dad.
There is a brother that lives by the beach with a guy twice his senior.
They share martinis and aged bottled wine talking about social movements and Bill Clinton.
You see, he chooses to cohabitate with a man he knows is living his last few years and not a person that tied his shoes until he was 7 years old because he was too busy making time for other kids, stretching himself for everyone else that he had time for no one. There are certain unforgivable things a parent can do, like leaving too early, taking off 5 minutes before when he could have waited 10, turning the lights off when they should have stayed on, always. Yet there is a certain kind of pressure that is put on someone that is no less human than anyone else. Someone that can draw architecture and buy ice cream on days when limbs are too heavy to go to school can’t be all bad. Despite the entire trauma, you still pray and rescue wounded animals and that is something that can only be taught and not learnt.
So as these estranged family members disintegrated and gathered informative pieces about me through loose lips curious to see if I would fail, ravenous to know inevitable tragedy.
I unflinchingly understood the arbitrary imaginative reel of what is to be alone. To grasp all things violent and horrific to witness and endure it with closed fists and well-aware eyes. To go on vacation trips and enjoy the sunburnt noses of tourists waving their flyers in the air like flamingos flapping off the insects from their pink wings. Instead of playing in the sand with a second pair of hands and having inside jokes there was a long inspection of scars and the way adults consulted with other adults by trying out different words like masks hoping to impress and even humiliate the other with their colorful lyrics but after all only jargon.  
My father’s name is Lazarus. As in open tomb, cheating death with the sweet victory of another pulse.
I often dream about his funeral. The day when there is no father to blame, no man to pin my overzealous heart of anxiety. To face a family that is neither welcoming nor reproachful but is always silent. Just dagger glances, fang and hiss.  I wake up in sweat. Sometimes it is because I am there and the casket is open but he’s laughing and no one showed up, there is no wind and my legs feel like a tube of jelly, microwaved honey. I try to say the things I’ve always wanted to tell everybody that has ever had anything to do with me, the apologies I shouldn’t have handed and the truth I should have had memorized anyway. But I just end up spitting seeds, a million of them flowing out of my hands dragging me out like a million wingless flies rejecting the tears that I cried for all the wrong reasons.
Other times it is crowded with people I didn’t know about, wasn’t aware of like searching through a private drawer and finding *** toys or things you wish you hadn’t discovered and the casket is empty, there is an imprint of a body but no one resides inside until the floor drops and there are stairs I’ve seen before, somewhere at some point. When I get to the bottom there’s a whisper
“where can I find you if not in here, on skin that is my own, on a forehead where no one asks if it remembers Chinese food and the pinch of birth.”

I love my father but I would never tell him no not directly.
I love him to death and am relieved to know
I will never be a dad.
Never be a forced hero.
Never proof of something that wasn’t trying to hide in the first place.

This is a letter to strangers, a dissertation, repertoire
to people I have known but have not fully held
to the ones that I am bound by blood but would not
recognize in a crowded room
out of all these ambiguous characters
I am unlucky number 6. An anomaly of chance girl. Not the settling of dust but of the silent movement before it was ever frazzled by frantic feet. The calm you don’t want to realize exists.

The man who wears a leather belt and uses sensible words
loves her in cobalt violet, in the streaks of a hazy violent sky
after a storm has passed and she lets him
he claims that the egg people are coming, they’ll bring with
them handful of gifts of glory, of the things people hide
in the crevices of sidewalks, in the spaces where identity cards
are devoured by the teeth of the unknown
the television is always on and the static that surrounds them
is the serenading music she listens to before she falls asleep at night
she pretends that love is painting one’s nails while the other
loses their mind
as he laughs at the invisible neighbors outside the window
his bones can smell the coming of the apocalypse
and it’s not in the form of a swarm, or a flood
it comes in the bodies of girls with strawberry blonde
hair and that’s why he’s so drawn to her
and why his mother was swallowed by the earth
she learns that illness comes in permanent mauve
the walls of her room are covered in that hue
the boy she sneaks cigarettes from at the diner
in his car the color is almost a tangible personification
the smoke blows out into the crisp air like a bag of potato chips
the lungs constrict and expand
the thoughts hindered from years of yielding to the yellow sun
with the ****** robe
the child, the woman, the human lives in ****
but the thinker manages to escape years later
and live in the suburbs on an easy paycheck from
foolish strangers that believe that gasoline is a cheap party trick
and a fantastic high
she doesn’t recognize touch anymore besides
the harsh graze of asphalt hitting her knees
people seldom realize that freedom is not in
the way your toes curl but in the way they finally unfurl
how curious you can spot patterns where there are none
to be rescued does not always come in the way of clean arms

She loved him in transparent maroon
the grasp of warm sand kissing you gently

you’re a shy hiss
her voice echoes, whispers through the
stringy hair of green overgrown grass
I’m not the sister you knew all those years ago
the gods have been dangerous to me
in the city of root rot in between the cashmere sweaters
you stole from heaven, from shopping windows
the harvest is unfinished, as the gladiolas bow in prayers
for the follies underneath my petticoat
you wanted the birds to sing but now they scream
for the arrival of summer in the veins I consider
abused blue but have always been crimson sugar
I want to reach out and hold your hand
but it’s foreign now, the youth like creeping vines
that we clung to have vanished
leaving residuals of a wasteland that we once considered
home, manicured to remind you the letters you
threw out of your mouth from the roofs of
sunset apartments
the drugs you hid in the eye sockets of boys
that would eventually be murdered in ally streets
in downtown LA  
adulthood didn’t come in a red box
it came as mother death, knocking her meaty hand
on the door, uninvited and unintentional
as she rubs her temples with the bones of
the misguided
I’m grown don’t you know, you exclaim
I know the difference between the red rose
and the sick serpent underneath it
sure the children would think you crazy before
but when you talk about the rats always clawing
at night at the ceiling of your mouth
you know to laugh, you know that the wallpaper isn’t
shifting for everyone but it’s the gift of
knowing that there’s always two sides of things
that keeps you grounded
in the ever shifting quicksand of this moderate
temperature room for the easy living

It’s no longer burn the witch
it’s drown the ******
purity only attainable when it’s served
as a death dessert, martyr Mary
do you understand TV dinners
made the housewife go extinct
or berserk, I think that’s how it goes
catching their heads in ovens as protest
but listening came in through the door
as a catcall, festering on ottoman chairs
smoking that new cigarette with a cautionary
tale at bedtime
the ends  being ground, like the beef
that we’re all guilty of starting between
sighs, or the coffee beans blistered
trying to come up with an excuse as to why
high heels won’t break that man’s spine,
and it won’t in that new suit he’s so possessive of
because he paid for it with the sweat of his back
as the gaggle of his fellow businessmen
scuffle over who gets to lick the perspiration
that earned him that respect, that bought
the privilege of feeling like a man that stands out
from the wolves in offices, waiting at midnight
for the froth to begin to foam and to
claw at reasons why the bed is always empty
when he’s everything everyone wants to be
and I think you begin to sympathize,
I think you begin to understand why
balancing a ballpoint pen between your
forefinger and thumb is equally as
drinking the cup half full
the modern man with his chiseled teeth
and overt way of speaking throws
up at the American Dream, standing
naked in the glory of publicity fame
there’s too much lights, the makeup
is too intense
the crown of jezebels
Belongs to the hardworking man
with the unkempt lawn, and the
natural features of a god
it’s no longer burn the witch
it’s freeze the *****
while they stand flirting
with the boondocks trapping
fireflies and weak Christians
in their hair
and will you listen to me now?
as the hordes of provoked
believers stand in crowded
bars and in your own home
******* themselves mentally
as they chew and spit
into each other’s mouth
what they’ve always wanted to hear
and the pleasure comes from
not knowing and not wanting to know
and will you touch me now?
that the fantasy is created in your own image
and will you worship me now?
that I agree with these shackles
telling me that they were always meant to be there
that ******* is next to holiness
and will you accept me now?
that the book has been rewritten
and the villain is not you nor me
but the refrigerator with the lizard
that tempted humankind and
banished them from ever entering paradise again
and will you **** me now?
that comedy is only worth in whoever
has the longest tongue

There are two types of secrets
the ones sworn under oath never to tell anyone
whispered in crowded hallways
and while getting cold water from the corner store
and the ones you weren’t supposed to hear
the ones tossed in the dark, the ones forbidden
under the fingernail sensitive
top of the tongue scalding, threatening to
taser your skin with the weight, the electricity
that these words hold suspended in thick air
every Sunday evening I would listen to the
perfect consonants through the wall
the sacred sermon my mother and father would ritualize
the stories from before child, B.C
it would start with a question, so daintily pressed through
gleaming teeth
and he would bellow triumphantly about the hero within him
the time he intervened between two bloodied men with
pulpy faces touching with the grace of dancing gods  
his fists gracefully gliding between a pool of face
and can’t we calm down, and can’t we breathe the hot asphalt
of the day, the gravel of car exhaust ******* out
our sweat, I think you can
and these men with missing teeth and missing souls
would spit but their heads would level and my
heart would soar up through the ceiling, flutter right out
through
but these fairy tales were also horror stories
about the time the man was a boy and his father would
chase after him with a crowbar never to return home,
running barefoot through the hot concrete of the streets
causing blisters to appear like water balloons
popping them like the lungs that burst that day
but nothing but tears exploded out of them
and I thought I understood
the legend of the damsel in distress
my mother waiting by the door, waiting for the burns to fade from
her skin, waiting for the roof to cave in like the feelings
she promised she would swallow with cough medicine
and funerals are only birthday parties when you’re surrounded
by death, oh to be young
but then the secrets started to venture out of the confines of
my home, spilling out of my bed to become
real stories I told myself at school when I didn’t have
a Band-Aid for the scorching burn of sitting all alone
so I started living them, as I sat huddled in the bathroom
envisioning a toy cowboy stranded in the middle of the
bathtub, repeatedly soaked to make his clothes almost sun
bleached and his smile submerged, blotting, erasing
teaching myself that there’s no such thing as free will
when decisions are made for you
and this toy cowboy with his gun perched politely on his hand
Ready to deal some bullets or a handshake,
I never knew which but it didn’t matter
when there wasn’t conversation exchanged and
I wondered if he tried to escape when I wasn’t looking
did he feel like a goldfish in a bowl
his reality distorted, the glass too thick to realize
there was more than loneliness, more than
constant drowning, that being cold wasn’t a
state of being
no I don’t think so
that was the big secret you see
listening when one has nothing to say
you pick things up like lost puppies
or thumb tacks left on the floor
or you lose them like bobby pins and self-made money
my memories, my worst enemy
coming to an empty house at age 13
no home-made meal like pressing my face against
the carpet, being stealthy quiet
until I heard sound downstairs
the neighbors, the clatter of dishes being distributed
around the dining room table
laughter and television news about the ****** of a
teenager being shot outside his front yard
and this was my bread and butter
screaming of kids wrestling about who gets the
bigger piece of cake
the movement of chairs, the kissing of feet
walking from one room to the other
and although these mumbles didn’t tell their story
it told mine
the living room turning from bruised peach
to melancholy blue, solitude buzzing
through the creme brulee walls of my parents
studio apartment,
the tapping of a faucet, the slight erratic breathing
of a pipe leaking gas nearby but I survived
there are two types of secrets told
the ones you’re supposed to listen to
and the ones you forgot you knew