LatinosUSA

Arbor Omega

Once there was hope—
in the branch
that curves upward 
to shake hands
with the sky.

Once robust and lush,
bursting with roses red,
yellow, and pink, now
a burned husk with 
blackened limbs that

skeleton downwards—
broken, bare, bereft,
like the bluster of a leader
whose luster lies 
in a crypt, long gone—
forgotten.

This is our destiny.
No matter how
cloud-stippled 
the azure sky,
or bright the sun,
in the end we
are all undone.

~~

The Heart is a Lonely Thumper

I had to pass the laundry room to get
	to Maddy’s place, had to
	walk down that dark gray hall
in the basement of the apartment house
	where I lived in Denver. On that
	lonely night, 3 a.m., I woke up 
with a pulse of 120. I didn’t think 	
	I could breathe. I thought 
	I was having a heart attack.

I worked on the medical ward at Denver General 
Hospital, age 19, an orderly—
	a conscientious objector during Nam.
I’d taken one too many patients to the morgue.
	A little medical knowledge
	can lead a guy astray. 
I kept telling myself it was anxiety, but
	that’s hard to believe when your
heart is thumping out a message
	on a terminal war drum, and there’s
no more oxygen in the room.

Maddy was sweet, understanding—she 
	let me sit in her brown stuffed chair,
	then removed the white terrycloth 
bathrobe she’d put on to answer the door—
	paused a second or two to make sure
	I took in her lovely, tiny breasts
and her lush auburn mound, before crawling
	into the sleeping bag she shared
	with her boyfriend.

Somehow, the yin and yang situated in that
	dark basement in Denver 
	calmed me down. Somehow, I found
a future in that moment of sultry kindness.

~~

Wyoming Lobster

How did lobsters get to Cheyenne, Wyoming
in the fifties? They must have flown them 
into our tiny airport. Had they come by train
truck, or stagecoach, they would have croaked. 

The lobsters that my father handed my mother
on a bright day in June were very alive—
vibrant, frisky, maybe even horny. Four 
of them were in the box. My sweet mother

gently lifted the box and dumped the doomed
crustaceans into a pot of boiling water, whereupon
those prehistoric nightmares bolted out of that 
torrid hell and scurried, pinchers and grinders

wildly flailing, along our kitchen floor. It being
summer, mother was barefoot and commenced
to scream, jump, bounce off countertops and
dish drains. She finally lit atop our state

of the art portable dishwasher, gazing wistfully
at her toes, grateful they were all still attached.
My dad, a veteran of foreign wars and countless
Cheyenne watering holes, stood transfixed, 

watching the crazed arthropods crabbing across 
kitchen tile and listening to my mother hoot and 
holler. One of those rusty decapods squeezed itself 
under our refrigerator where it still may be today.

~~

Mother’s Funeral Mass

The altar boy’s shoes    were caked 

with mud   He 

was more    like an altar man, 

a mini-priest 

in a hooded robe     instead 

of the usual cassock   and 


surplice    Adorned 

in his   feces-tinted sneakers

he appeared    to be 

the    avatar 

of carelessness   of proclivity

to sin