Your Impossible Voice

The sky at this hour melts into the ocean. The egrets are dark specks against the backdrop. A single blinking yellow beacon lights up the rocky strip along the malecón. The taste of saltpeter coats my tongue, and I savor the night with a sense of modesty. The night is long and bustling, and while I wait for the Moro, I dive into the pulp of bodies. The members of the tribe know me. They know I’m a queer fish, a loner.

In 1986 we moved from Linda, California, where I went to Cedar Lane School with all the migrant children, to the neighboring town of Olivehurst, where I would go to school with the whites. During the Great Depression, the poorest of the US—then—Oklahoma—left their dust bowl to get into this bowl: the concave bowl being California’s Central Valley north of Sacramento, and the rim being the mountains. Olivehurst was full of poor white people, and then we came. We were pioneers, one of the first Mexican families to call this Okie place home.

and I want to know did she ever watch the gulls at Race Point hang on nothing but invention, moving a little up, a little down, strung on thread, and did she ever feel not the invisible force of poetry or love or being held in a net of earthly connection,

Dean didn’t think he’d ever again feel comfortable at Taco Bell, but he agreed to Tacos El Chimpa’s because No Están Buenos … ¡Pero quitan el hambre! had been spray-painted underneath the sign. Dean knew enough Spanish to know that meant bad tacos. If we’re going to eat tacos, he said, they should at least be terrible. The waiter placed glasses of jetsam-flaked water in front of the boys. The water rose out of the glasses to the yellow-stained ceiling, formed little gray clouds bumping against each other, and sent tiny shocks of lightning, making everyone’s hair on their arms stand on end.