Love on the Streets: Selected and New Poems

Marrying Ramon at Thirteen

• 85 marrying ramon at thirteen The only time inside his house, small Mexican classic, really Arab, cream stucco, the archways, the red brick roof tiles formed over the Indian thighs. Foster home. His tribe unknown. The den. I always see this. He gently nudges me down across the tight grosgrain-covered bed. The room clean, perfect, out of a magazine. Pale peach cream, sand pastels, sage greens, crimson bougainvillaea dripping from the tile. Smell of geranium, swish of pepper, eucalypti release, sway of palm, the ping ping ping of the red pepper seeds dropping onto the patio. Pink. Maybe this is the first time we almost go too far, maybe the first time the unbearable eros of place, of being where you’re supposed to be, where you could be caught, the hell in that for both of us, the adults elsewhere in the house, or gone for a rare moment, the incredible allure of a bed, of where you’re supposed to be when you make love. “Lura.” Sweet sounds, sweet smells, luxuriant feels, the comfort and cleanliness of the wed. “Ramon.” Safe, not sage not dirt not the dry river bed and rocks not animal shit not human come on the haybarn floor and stucco grade school hall where we hide to finally move our bodies into each other, the way it would be if we could marry, this, a married couple’s bed, the Reeves, foster parents like Fosters Freeze, so cold so twisted so man-made that old man, she so formidable her daybed, guest bed, his bed I’m hearing now, you sleep here? Every night? The way love should be ending in sleep. Warm breeze like a prayer whispered across their two bodies. The power of it. Of myself of him of them of all of it. Cacti standing up all around his handbuilt her handkept house and no signs of the boy. Sentinels. ...