Guns are always next to the old television sets.
The kind that are called
“the sets”
“the tube”
“lonely night comfort and clean tooth money spender”, you know, your childhood gathered in small dusty screens.
I’m not sure where I’m getting at, something about violence being next to fishing equipment. Maybe that’s where Sundays are stored. That we’re all pawn shop children wasting away in places with  streets that are named after trees, the irony being that there is no life growing between the cracks of sweaty cement. On the driveways where skeletons are buried underneath like they own the land.
Where the living haunt the dead and there is no expiration date besides the milkshakes you refused to accept from that boy with the lazy eye.
I'm sorry if I sound insensitive when I say that these wars are always fought in vain.
That no matter how many people you save, there's always someone
drowning in the dark corners where no one wants to look.
Look.

There was ink in his mouth and it was Monday morning, doomsday morning.
The comparison of both these seemingly random attributes could mean nothing at all
to anybody else but they came hand in hand for a man that always walked with his shoes untied
and while the rest of the world chewed tobacco; he chewed cinnamon sticks that he would grind
to a fine powder in his mouth spitting it out at nearby ant mounds and by the nests of bumblebees.
This nomad’s of nobody’s business would wander the streets of his hated town, the world’s armpit, the city of fire and angels and whatever the hell else.
He would walk Pico Boulevard all the way to Wilshire Ave., towards Venice and then crookedly stumbling to Van Nuys but he didn’t know his bus routes and his mind was always swarmed by imaginary bugs that he picked up from old soda cans.
What he loved most of all was stopping by the bridges of highways and looking all the way down to
the cars below swimming past in a hurry; the sky dark blue and the headlights like light bulbs
almost running out of their batteries. He saw this as cathartic as most people saw sunsets or a pianist
shaking his head violently to his own tune and it was true. This simple man was born, some say, out of dust, car exhaust and the lost ID cards of peoples’ whose wallets were stolen. However intriguing this could be it wasn’t so.  He was born in a hospital in Chinatown and his mother had gold teeth that glistened whenever she drank too much and how often they shone.
You see, I knew this man long ago when my hair cascaded down my back in fine strokes and my lungs
weren’t yet tired from the things I chose to inhale. For all my purposes, this was the only person I wanted to talk about, to spit and screech whenever I heard his name and I didn’t even exactly know his name; The poor imbecile. He went by different pseudonyms and I suppose I did too but I had a name that most knew. Carmen and Leopold. They chose to remember it because it rolled off, it clawed at your teeth as you said it.
But Monday mornings were a specialty. It meant that he could go and see his brother who lived across town, the one who sang at fancy pubs and refined restaurants, where people didn’t have to yell to admire you, but slowly clapped, a soft hum in a room where everyone understands and doesn’t have to make up for it in the way they whistle your name. He always shook his head at this profession.
“You’re an animal to these people, an exhibit they can safely see from their auditoriums and then go to sleep without having to take you home. Your last hurrah will come soon and then what will you do?”
He didn’t understand Leopold’s hostility. This art he was drawn to. This voice that could have been
given to anybody but it was given to him. Deep down he knew he would never be a big star, he would never leave the place where he born. He would die close to where he went to elementary school and what a big sham, the whole big world so big and he would never see it. Never unfold, instead slowly
crumble like the crust of cakes he stared at through shopping windows.

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