Hustle. David Tomas Martinez

the porch,

      I listened to my grandfather

      sing in a rusted tongue.

      His sharpest tool was tomorrow.

      The ice cream man’s song

      was my jam;

      I’d jump the low,

      leaning fence surrounding the yard,

      slapping the light pole as I went by.

      At night, young men

      huddled under the yellow light,

      their pants sagging,

      their homemade tattoos

      thickening with age.

      I laughed at how

      their underwear in jowls

      hung past their belt,

      at the broken belt loops

      toothed with dirt.

      Me and my primas played

      under the kitchen light,

      our bodies bumping against the table,

      tipping the chilies and spilling the salt.

      Outside, blue and red rotated

      on the sheet over the window,

      the tied ends on the curtain rod

      flickered like Christmas

      while cruisers converged

      and black men ran and slid

      across hoods. When

      everyone was braceleted,

      cops talked into their shoulders

      in squawks and pauses,

      picked up the spilled pockets

      and tipped-over bottles,

      laughing as they nudged

      the boys against

      the hoods of their cars.

       6.

       I shall wear my Chuck Taylors

       beige guts aglow,

       crease my khakis

       to a sharp shank.

       I will swing first

       or shoot my mouth

       at any tremble

       of trouble.

       A bandana grows

       from the soiled edges

       of my right pocket. Look how

       it grows. Look.

      When the moon slicks the night

       motherly, me and my boys nibble

      our beer bottles. And know

       the slant of pride, the hubris

      of a first tattoo: walking shirt off, chest out,

       the edges raised on a fresh brocade of name.

      And my family didn’t recognize pride:

       being a father before seventeen,

      running in a black gang, and

       losing my tongue— burying it in the dirt of our yard.

      When brought home in the back of cruisers,

       lights let the neighbors in—on what was up.

       7.

      Tonight I can write the most violent lines,

      maim the beautiful, misprision the sublime,

      decapitate rhyme with chiming execution,

      kidnap with the prolonged rip and break of poems;

      tonight, in the rain, in anger, I violence lines.

      Write, for example, the eyes are starry,

      when fists blue and shiver off the distance.

      The night, in anger, scratches out the sky.

      On a night like this, on a hospital bed, I squinted

      under the upmost light, stitched and stitched again,

      a stethoscope swayed in the ventilated air.

      I scratched the air trying to chase it away.

      Tonight I write from a foxhole of hate.

      To think I have slipped in this docile skin.

      The sounds fall in from the street, chased in.

      What does it matter the night has healed,

      a scar shines in the sky, a scar shines on my head.

      That is all. The night is filled with holes.

      I rifle my memory, nothing but

      the same light whitening my head;

      the art of shame so short and healing so long.

      I don’t love them anymore, that’s certain, but how I loved them;

      so much, my fists tried to ride the wind from their teeth.

      On nights like this, I too, made women

      mountains to climb, flowers to pick, giants to nuzzle

      but, I too, have seen my grandmother wrinkled

      with realization, white tears falling from

      the lines of her face and her unpinned hair,

      how all she could do was chop onions

      when love and silently turning the cheek

      couldn’t stop uncles from touching nieces.

       8.

      As a boy I died

      into silent manhood.

      I hid the words

      teachers helped me find.

      People always pine for the ease

      of an earlier time, when life

      was lunch-boxed with fruit

      in the water fountain line,

      so much explained during recess time.

      I hid the words teachers helped me find.

      I spoke in the twist

      of fingers to gang signs.

      In the color of shoe laces

      or which way my brim was tilt,

      I hid the words teachers

      helped me find.

       9.

      At nine

      years old

      I sat in

      understudy

      at the bar,

      worshiping

      Shirley Temples.

      Grandpa smiled

      and said

      Let’s go

      as I chewed

      a maraschino,

      Dante’s devil,

      a cherry

      in nine

      rings of ice.

      I finished

      the meat,

      threw down

      the stem.