In the desert
You drive for miles.
So long, that you
Learn to make
Polite conversation
With the rocks in the
Dull mountainsides.
You learn to listen to nothing:
Music, chatter, the hum of cars.
In the desert,
In the heart of the heat and sweat
You hide inside
On cool leather couches
That have offered their seat
To the generations before you.
You listen to them speak endlessly about
The secrets – gossip and giggles
They hold in the family
Tight enough
To sneak between only each other
And the small neighborhoods they live in.
Nothing leaves this valley.
In the desert
History pours from their lips,
Slipping off of their tongues
Like spit and spice.
Canela.
We’ve always been a mix
Of some sort of spicy sweet.
Chase it with tequila and tamales
And on to the next.
In the desert we aren’t
“Those kind of Mexicans”
That believe in “voodoo shit”
Dia de Los Muertos
La Raza.
We don’t wear our
Heritage
With the same kind of
Colorful pride as others.
Not in Indio,
Where one lives dedicated to the
Valley they’ve been in for
Long enough to forget
From where ever it was they came from.
So we leave the desert.
To drive home
Back to the city
And this time
We go through the mountains,
With a trail of cars
Like little fire ants in a line.
And as the sun sets,
They transform into
Dark silhouettes
And the sky takes its time
To shut its eyes to rest.
Leaving those strong hills
Black like the eyes of your grandpa
With the same soft halos
That wrapped the heads
Of the saints hung
On your family’s walls.
And the stars, like freckles
On your baby cousins cheeks,
Consumed the night unlike
Any sky you’ve seen before.
And I sit with my
Face pressed against the car window
From 22 to 12 in an instant.
In my dad’s car —
My grandma’s car—
So old that all we listen to
Are his cassettes from when
He was my age.
Driving down the same roads
To leave the desert
To leave his home
And start something different.
Indio, Coachella, La Quinta
As endless
And vast
As all the wonders I’ve ever had
For the people in it.
Each grain of sand
Is a question I left unsaid.
If you’re smart,
Or maybe lucky,
Growing up
Is the journey
From learning
To unlearning
To relearning
And again
And again.
And I have been in and out
Of this desert so many times
I have run away and come home
So many times.
That I don’t know what to unlearn
And relearn
I was gone long enough
To let the first death
Become a ghost I never knew.
How many times
Must I lay to rest
All the ideas I’ve had
About who my family was. Is.
Before it’s actually time
To do so for real.
