I've the book in my hands. I've been presented as the reader of the poem. How to interpret this cerebral, obscure, layered text. It will be incomprehensible. I give a short history of the meaning of Aaztlán (SP) and the Chicano movement. A part of North America that is not now part of Mexico, but long ago... They'll be impressed by my knowledge. It's also incumbent upon me to give a short history of the ephemeral print history of this book, its publication by Weird Tales. Perhaps this context will help them when the words begin to spill out.

Turning the pages, looking for the text. Page that is a leaf. Page that is part lace doily. My eyes will find the right page. Flipping. Tiny, dense, square type.

As reader, I stand on a low dais in front of wood and glass panelled doors that can open and close. People will mostly enter the space behind me and to my right. The seating, large, carpet covered steps, rises in front of me and to my right. Gentle, diffuse, pooled lighting.

The audience is bound to shift, drift in behind me as I read. And they'll leave, too. Can they really want to hear this reading, which will surely go over their heads. I speak to them, take an informal poll of their desire to hear poetry or do readings themselves. I request information about time constraints. Surprisingly, the majority is intent on hearing the poem.

I return to the task of finding the text among the pages so crammed with type, brown and brittle with age.

The broken space inside me. The walls. The spread. Say the words I associate with the image. Say them in the order my eyes move across the objects in the drawing. This is how this image is read. Or better, simply describe the whole of the image in my own words. This is how the image is read. I have been used to the poem being the precise words of the author. But these images can be described in whatever words the reader chooses.

As reader, I stand in my damaged feet in loose, white, cotton socks on a wood floor. Lucky I can't feel my feet. In front of wood and glass panelled doors. Audience members drift in and out. More joining than departing.

Horses burst through doors in front of me and to my left. Dappled white gray horses. The listeners up in front of me and to my right are still attending to what I'm reading. The exuberance of the sports enthusiasts outside can't be quelled. The crowd roars. Tremendous haunches, backs decorated in red and gold. Prancing hooves.



~~~~~~~~~

Balancing being a body and exploring the life of the mind.

This is how you use the magic medicine, she says. The new plastic bottle of amber liquid, covered from top to bottom with a white label full of black print. Now is a good time. There's a full moon in Czechoslovakia, so the time is right. I'll have to buy a little book that lists the positions of the planets throughout the year, so I will be able to know what times to choose to employ the medicine. She didn't even need to refer to a book.

You put this in your mouth. My tongue senses slippery and hard, two parts held together by delicate cord, one larger than the other, a solid but raw organ of some small animal. I'm embarrassed to have dead animal in my mouth, and I feel ashamed to have given up being vegan so easily. And you need to swallow it next to your address. Does she mean on the steps in front of where I live. Where is that. An apartment building with names typed in black on white paper next to an old-fashioned buzzer system with black buttons? Maybe if I write out my address and lie down near the paper. It's tough holding it in my mouth. I want to swallow. Do I wash it down with the liquid in the bottle. Oh, one half went down my throat. Salivating with the effort of not swallowing the larger part.

Do you feel that? she asks me. Her facial expression directs my attention behind me. I turn, still seated in the chair at the table I share with her, and see that the other woman is giving birth. Her question meant did I feel the glowing energy that she is able to sense radiating from the birth. I can't feel the energy the way she does, and it occurs to me that I could lie, oh sure I feel it, but I decide to simply not answer. Two men stand over the woman giving birth on the sofa, a father and brother. She makes the sounds of giving birth, but the pain doesn't sound as extreme as it usually is. After a few pushes, she makes a larger sound and her head arches back, her face contorted more in pleasure than in pain.

She's had the baby. That last push moved it out of her. She stands up from the sofa, smiling, and her blue granny dress covers her. There's no sign that she's just had a birth experience. Wow, I say to the woman who's giving me the medicine, how are you gonna top that? Because she's pregnant, too, and will give birth soon. And she will naturally feel the need to compete with the speed and ease of the birth we've just witnessed.

First Wrathful She-Khan and then Sonreído enter and stand near the table. WSK tells me that Sonreído has finished his opus. I'm moved and pleased. I look at his smiling, relieved face and think of his thirty hours a week of work and his twenty hours a week of refining the magical, transformative elements of his creation, and try to formulate something to say to him about how amazing it must be for him to have the fruits of his dedication, how hard he worked.

Then we're outside, walking on the grass near the cliff down to the water, and I'm explaining to WSK how to take the medicine with your address. Do I have some paper and a pen so that we can write down her address.

They shouldn't even ask me to come out on a mission. It's during my scheduled off-duty time. Legs in front of a sofa ending in high heeled pumps. This negotiation over my going on the assignment is simply protocol. They ask and I go. My protest is the merest facesaving.

At the assignment. This woman and her daughter, what possible value can they have in the world of espionage? The mother's picked out a film she wants them to go see. This listing, this theater, this time. I shake open the newspaper pages, looking for times and venues. Here are a few showtimes and theaters where it's playing. Can't find the showing she pointed out. Oh, that showing was too far away, anyway, on the other side of the Beltway. There's some arranging to do to get them to one of these. But with me doing the arranging, it will be easier than it would be for these two, who are intimidated by the details of moving in the world, lost, impotent.

The mother is briefly a shadow of la bonita, who is a shadow of my mother.

Here out walking down the sidewalk on a quiet street with Mono and his friend, a slender Asian man in his thirties. We're all wearing sneakers and comfortable, baggy pants. This is hanging out. I'm ambling slightly behind them. I don't walk by Mono's side like I used to, because we're not together anymore. The shared mood is careless and relaxed, everything's okay. His silence is now without weight.

We pause in our walk next to a curbside planting strip. Bare earth and several varieties of clover. Mono's friend points them out. He is familiar with these three strains. One has rosemary-like leaves, but still topped by the white petal ball clover flower, although there are less blooms on the plant. I'll save these to plant in the spring. You can pull them out and the roots, if you keep them dry and cool, will stay dormant through the dark months when the earth is cold.

Maybe I shouldn't have pulled this one out. I try to replant it where the earth makes a vertical incline of a few inches up to the sidewalk surface. The earth is soft and dry, I press the hard, thin roots into the earth.

I'll ask Mono if he wants to share space with me in the patch of herbs I'm planting next summer. The green angel keeps telling me he's gotten more space and he'll plow a plot just for me. I'll have all these rare kinds of clover and epazote and basil. It will take some thought, figuring out how to plant them so that they get sunshine at the perfect times of the day. So the more delicate herbs are shaded by the ferocious, sun-hungry ones. So the sun hits their leaves just so. It starts warming from the outside of each small leaf and its light spreads to the center like from the top of the mountain down into the valley.

The clock is here on the sidewalk. Touching it, breaking it, or it might have already been broken. This is the clock I was glancing at when I was lounging and reading. The one clock in the house that was set an hour late. The clock that made me late to my espionage assignment. That was a farce, scrambling to get the blonde wig on. But then I got there and pretended everything was normal, and it seemed to turn out okay, although I have no idea of the objective.

In the women's living room in my spy role, and a text message appears on my phone from someone I know. I-5 is completely stopped because of the thousands of people massing on the overpass in protest. When I see them, the freeway looks like a portion of 84. The overpass is phenomenally high. I see the crowd teeming up there.

Down here below on a large unpaved, tree-shaded area off the highway, I see them. These are the animals whose suffering that has inspired the protest. The massive animals' dark hides are flecked with blood from many small cuts. Their feet are chained to the curved boards so they are forced to stand. Their bodies are rigidly chained so they cannot change position. As I walk around the end of the platform, I see the silver metal chain around the silverback gorilla's waist. The chain pulls up, so his feet are chained down and his waist is being pulled upwards.

The crew of Hispanic men move around the beasts. The silverback is chained so rigidly that they can turn him on his side and lift him. Is there no danger from his agonized jaws. How can they torture him like this. But this is how animals are treated everywhere.

This is what we do to animals.

Oh, please tell me that the protest, the spontaneous uprising, is not in denial of the situation of all animals. No, no, let it not be that the people are massing in racist hatred of these Hispanic men. That's like blaming the slaughterhouse on the poor men of color, Blacks, Latinos, who are oppressed there as workers.

An exchange between me and the man who lifted the silverback as if it were so much dead meat. The immobilized animal is much too large for this man, or any single man, to lift. I'll not face off with him. I'll move away, because it's not about him.

This is what is done to animals. Pain in every part of their bodies.
This is what is done to animals. Pain in every part of their bodies.
This is what is done to animals. Pain in every part of their bodies.