Aliens
1. The fisherman loved to frighten them with stories of a fighter squad of flying diablo squid like alien jets of red flesh, flashing madwhite & arterial, who would steal a man from the boat on the night seas of Cortes, spearing him with their cactus suckered tentacles shot like a policeman’s electrical tasers, to disappear like halos from this dimension lightning-pricked into nothingness-like Hell. It had been nine days since they were sealed in the back of that truck filled with Tijuana livestock, heading for Tucson. The fisherman said one had to become a devil to travel between darkness and flesh, hunger and immortality. One had to cross children selling imitations of the Virgin and diamond-shaped chiclets, packets of colored chewing gum and blankets with the Aztec calendar’s inscriptions and then swim through the desert of nopales like strange sea creatures crucifying darkness sweating hiding in your thirst, fugitive like the future until salt in that darkness saves you. 2. Tijuana was bright, glittering red green and goldwhite lights like a space station at the center of the galaxy. Haunched in the blackness with chickens, watching a grown man pissing into the cup of another man’s hands, I heard cries fugitive for any future from the bodiless dark scuffling like a coyote’s across the wet, warm neck of the white sacrificial rabbit’s shallow breathing: my mother finally collapsed and did not wake up. In the truck, her shriek smelled of torn oranges like black sweaty churches in the dirt. Now, high on the turpentine fumes of night creosote I think my blood is like a sunshine I will never see. Lost in the desert, stumbling alone and laughing how madly I rip the new cactus blossoms opening like thirsty suicidal moons, and I eat them. Earth, I am an Illegal Child who will die of this thirst. I am eating your fucking dirt. Scratching myself, I fall against these cactus thorns. I can’t believe all the ragged moonlight bleeding and flickering down my face and arms. Like a priest in church I laugh and touch the penitential torches of the brave hearts of the foolish, hot, faithful human beings.