Of life in the barrio:
The blistering sun whips at our backs.
The welts rise in bubbles of sweat.
Our pores are attacked by floating clouds of decay.
They surround us. We become them.
We wake at the smell of one thousand burning bottles
and abandoned bloated road kill.
This rich painting is the landscape we call home.
We lie amongst the clouds as insects dissect our surroundings
and inhabit our bodies.
My brain fills with cockroaches.
My clothes are replaced by a colorful weave of scorpions.
Their claws grip to our skin so our shorts stay at waist level.
Their stingers cool us like the evening breeze.
The heat hacks at our throats without mercy
and we bleed thick waves of salty sweat.
While flies climb towards our filling bellies,
rubbing their hands like a delighted, crooked stockbroker,
they are confronted by a militia of laughter.
Mosquitoes hate nothing more than a porch full of children laughing.
We stoke the trembling fires of their smiles with Americana folkloric melodies
in reciprocation. Their smiles widen.
The cockroaches, mosquitoes, and thousands of hovering, starving flies can’t stand the happiness
through which we bear their biting.
They retreat to the clouds of smoldering refuse. They feast on it
and wait until the joy, the laughter, has subsided.
It is hard for them to find solace.
Just when they think they’ve spotted it, utter despair,
their flapping wings are berated by yet
another onslaught of unadulterated felicity.
We revel in their failure.
Later, our backs melt under the sun's evil stare:
you don’t belong here.
So we retreat.
He laughs at us as we flee into the hills. Our feet carry us like the lines of scurrying ants up
boulders and across centuries to paradise.
We awake to fresh air for the first time in months. Our lungs go into shock.
They sing out like a gospel choir, blessing the sweet breath of life.
But we betray our lungs
And return to plastic-filled dirt streets
American-dream injected rows of poverty.
The earth shutters a brighter blue
Here, our home?
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