Metro
Rodney Gomez
Home is a bus
full of scars,
hurricane tattoos,
arms black
and brown and purple,
women
from the waist up,
men
from the waist down.
On Route 66
I stitched
track marks on a mother
holding a sack
of ragweed in her arms,
her face a tattered afghan
I’d stroke in the dark
when I was high.
I rode every bus
into swashbuck then,
but I don’t remember
the stanchions.
I remember the manager —
a storm cloud
who washed his hands
whenever he touched the passengers.
He was all about efficiency.
In this life there is nothing
more pathetic
than a businessman.
✼
A man in a turquoise sash
speaks incessantly
about his catamaran:
a Stacy Adams shoebox
he plows into the flank
of the Sandia Mountains.
A man who fishes for ears
is often lonely
but there are too many
liquor stores on Lead.
He has an appointment
with the kind of wind
and heat that cleanse,
and pity he doesn’t know
how often they go
on vacation.
✼
I pull the stop cord
on Copper to hear
how the metal
veers carefully
into soft vein.
A mother rubs dust
from her baby’s throat.
Two boys gulp
water like radiators.
Heads are gauzed, necks
emblazoned with warring
versions of the Virgin.
I wear red to match
the seatbelts: fifty sardines
tasseled with blood.
✼
I used to be Mexican-
American, I used to be
Hispanic, wedded
like an unwilling bride
to maracas, chimichangas,
and Cinco de Mayo.
Then I took the bus
to Old Town.
A man with a grocery bag
leaking hatch chiles
stumbled into my lap
and said I smelled like rotten
eggs. He flashed a forearm
tag of a Karankawa bride.
Dissolution often happens
on the fly.
A year ago, when the 54
trampled an octogenarian
at the depot, I smelled
the Gulf of Mexico.
The wheels turned
over the curb like hands
making bread.
I left a makeshift prayer
in the gutter
where it still swells.
about the author