Wash your hands before leaving.
Every afternoon the television would have a woman in tears
Spanish dialogue, pastel colored sets
Tongue in cheek, modern romance sipping iced tea by the pool
The antagonist wearing a suit and three rings on each finger
Pause.
Soap bars are made of fat, the grease found in
Breakfast diners and sweat off a teenagers face
The lipids turning gelatinous and all I can think of is
Jell-o; the strange colored dessert that doesn’t taste like anything real
My hands begin to itch and I stand up
Wash your hands before leaving.
My hands have become open desert, dry animosity
The skin around the knuckles is delicate, one clench of a fist
I am sure that it will tear, like the skirt of a girl I once knew
But there are creatures lurking everywhere
In the handle of the bathroom door, in the shake of another hand
In the touch of a frame, in the grip of a key
Wash your hands before leaving.
The scattered murmurs on the screen remind me its 5p.m
The women are arguing with their manicured hands
Their eyes all having the same spidery lashes, spiders
I feel insects crawling under my bones
Termites clipping at my heels as I sit in this couch of horrors
I didn’t know the last time it had been washed
It smelled of the 1970’s and I want to go home
The babysitter is on the other chair reclined
Snoring, letting out bacteria through her mouth
At 8 years old I should be on the floor with a coloring book
My lips are dry, the screen is too bright, I can feel the filth everywhere I turn
So I stay
I hear the door knock and it’s my mother picking me up after work
My lungs sigh of relief
Time to go
But first
let me wash my hands before I leave

“Have you been to the Melrose café?
I heard they have the best lunch there”

“I always go downtown for coffee
helps you avoid the goons
and the smell of trash coming in through the door”

Francis St.
The neighborhood with the crooked spine streets, the intolerable hunchback it was in the armpit of Korea-town.
The snake stealth slither you acquired to get to the 7/11 down the street without your teeth being pulled out by a gun. In the 80’s the back wall of that convenience store was littered with
no-do gooders, the typical teenage gangster with ironic ****** white shirts and a mouthful of *****. An army with no motive.
Buzzards learning how to haunt instead of hunt.
In the afternoons it was speculated that they melted into the hot cement, an intimidating presence that smoked marijuana and made their cars jump.
With fear?
warmth?
happiness?
Who’s to say.
But times have changed. The hungry graffiti on the wall became the emblem of what had been, and what had survived. It was no longer us vs. them, it was me vs. you.
There’s a hostility that sinks into the earth and made the children more aggressive in playgrounds that endorsed healthy living; a melting *** reserved only for the diversely attacked and passive aggressive scrutinized bunch.
I lived on that street in the peach palm, salmon slapped building where I witnessed a domestically abused woman with a shattered nose smear her blood across the windowpane of the front door while I checked for the mail. Her hair was bleached and it hung dead on her scalp like sun rays that had gotten seasonal depression. Her face was a gauzy mess of a nosebleed. I felt for that woman the same way I felt for the slugs that people threw salt at. A sadistic addiction for soft things; There were bruises where there shouldn’t have been and I felt like the imperfections on the wall looking but unable to be seen. And I wondered if she could see me. She crouched on the corner of the steps and waited. I didn’t know what for. I could hear sirens, I could hear footprints of her abuser coming closer and picking her up like a rag doll. Opening the door and disappearing into the night with the sound of high heels slowly going mute. I stayed there until the blood dried. The next day the stain was gone and I wondered about all the other blemishes around the building and if they had the same disgust to them. Were the discolorations on the carpet of the hallways just violent memories?
I could smell the poverty inside that apartment. It clung to me like it held on to anyone.
I was guilty of it creeping into the beds of my nails while I tried in futility to wash it off.
Despite all the books I read, all the times I refused to step out of my room in fear of experiencing too much I was not saved from observing a lot of things. There was a cathedral church a couple blocks away that you could see outside the living room window and when the sun set. It almost felt like the presence of god looming just beyond, always assuring me that yes, I had not been abandoned but it wasn’t abandonment I worried about but about becoming what was inevitably seeping into the tap water, into the people with the olive skin that can’t unlatch their own cages.
Of becoming the shadow of a civilization that revels in the darkness.
I wanted to be a pageant queen on television with the pink lipstick instead of a statistic on the news of most likely dropping out of school and hiding in the crevice of welfare.
I wanted the palm trees without the choke-hold. I wanted the cool California weather without the open fires on July 4th, the firework setting flames to nearby homes telling me that this was the hell that came with freedom. The American dream was served in the oven and why won’t you accommodate to these standards you ask me and I don’t know how to reply.
While other kids played in their backyards and learned how to ride bikes, I learned how to survive, how to walk the streets without being murdered. These are good skills that transfer into college resumes.
So the roots of trees would come out of the ground like fists and demand reparations, they would sneak into the pavement and break car windows with the intention of stealing radios that they sold for a good penny. They carried knives and cackled at the neighborhood watch because all eyes were on them and yet nothing changed but I want to change, I want to change you chant.
Nothing will be the same since I lived in Francis st.
Named after the saint with the smugness in his smile and the gluttony blistering out of his dress.
Will you comfort me in my hours of need oh gracious one?
will you drink these sins like Catholics drink Jesus' blood on Sunday morning?
Is this blasphemy a reason to instill death between the hours of 2 and 4:30?
I’m always chasing on my knees for the knowledge that is taken away from the destitute culture that the ghettos become. I wanted to go back to the mud and dig all those lives that crossed mine and tell them that they could run after their intelligence. Save them from the quicksand. That one doesn’t have to be shot at a party for being raised by criminals. That cars that drive slow at night don't always have bad intentions.

But if I do, I’m afraid I’ll sink


I’ll sink

I act dumb in the dirt
In the soil, in the middle of the flies
that lick their wings, bat their tongues
in the dirt
I act dumb
for all the reasons that I’ve had to keep my back straight
at dinner tables
with narrow chairs that clip at the side of my thighs
for the party tricks that leave through the door
I become the punch line
in the muck, in the slime
I behave grotesquely
for the crowded silences in rooms
the friends that mistook my alienation
as a stab wound to laugh at
all the fireworks that exploded inside
this head, this brain, this basket of fruit
nothing like retaliation with a kiss
In the grime, in the earth’s decay
I act like panicked swords under anesthesia
drowsy summer swarm for
the times I’ve had to be a mother instead of a child
where walking down the street meant carrying
your weapons close to your chest
but remember enemies closer
I act dumb in the dirt

In the dirt everything is sublime

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.