A Field of Onions: Brown Study
dedicated to the immigrants buried in mass graves in and near Falfurrias, Texas
- I walk through a bald field blooming violet onions. I will know I am absolved when there is no more dirt underfoot, when I have flipped the earth and the river runs above us, a glassed belldark sound.
- To find: liver, lung, womb. A lens cut from vulture eye. This is what it is to miss a thing.
- At the McDonald’s, a man in a parked car will talk himself awake. This is another kind of hunger.
- A prayer for the king: forty pears, all bloomed from young throats. Long life, a sea of rice, a thicket of braids.
- Problem: Four boats arranged in a cross drift away from each other in opposing directions. What theory states that, all conditions remaining equal, they can reach each other again on the other side of a perfect globe?
- To understand a map is to shrink the world; to plan; to color.
- Can you smell the vinegar blood in the babes, stardappled. The survivors ride the beast train toward the North, over those rolled off onto the tracks. See their legs, scattered.
- Olga in Minnesota: to be with her mother amidst rags of spring snow. For now, she is curled in the glovebox of a Chevrolet Cavalier.
- Bless you, all that meat and milk, threaded. Pass, you fairer animal. Not you. I have seen the door in the water.
- Solution: Magical thinking.
- To panic is to feel all your wildness at once.
- A flock of geese felled to the open plain, the lush grass confounds even the birds for passable angles.
- We the holy, are never really still. Agitation pulls even at hanging planets.
- Four sirens twist their voices—four dead in the desert borderlands.
- In this dream, I am on a plane. I wake up to the pilot smiling down on me. No one flies the plane. Or, I am flying the plane.
- The threads fly loose on each body, some sown to others, some not. But let’s not take this metaphor too far; we are better than the obvious.
- A hero is a plane of being.
- I think of a girl at space camp, perched above a better telescope than she has in her room. Tonight, she figures space as a map of horses. Blur, focus. Blur and focus. Tonight, the clouds will pull apart for her. Tonight, we will all dream of horses.
- My ancestor says: Later, when I arrive at your house, I will hang a crown of flowers at your door. And yours. And yours.
- And: Sometimes I choose to come through your television. In sleep, you will mistake me for dripping water. You will think you heard your father. We visit each other in these ways.
- Plan B. From the moon, the earth is a crown of dark marble.
- There are varying kinds of tragedy that produce the same outcome: paperwork.
- And even if we were to save the trees, the hunger would still be so great something else would need saving.
- The heads of violet onions, rooted child fingers, blue-leafed lips. An orchard, a mass grave.
- I give you my coat and scarf in offering. I have no choice, I was born to saints in pilgrimage.
- Papery purple skin.
- Thesis: I swallow a bee for each ill deed done. I am a hive walking. I strain to hear you over the regret. about the author
