the wait for the lone bus

to return for their turn, after boarding,

after the little girl’s temperature spiked,

she suffered two heart attacks,

vomited, and stopped breathing. After

medics revived the seven-year-old

at Lordsburg Station, after

she was flown to El Paso where she died,

the coroner examined

the failed liver and swollen brain. Then,

Jakelin’s chest and head were stitched up

and she returned to Guatemala

in a short white coffin

to her mother, grandparents,

and dozens of women preparing

tamales and beans to feed the grieving.

In Q’eqchi’, w-e means mouth.

•••

Alloy

An Apostrophe for Isamu Noguchi

Is stone the opposite of dust? And if so, are we then stone before dust? And before that, some kind of betwixt? The mush inside a translucent chrysalis turning cellophane-clear when, of a sudden,

you can see the monarch throbbing and scratching its way into air—

unlike a centipede that lays eggs, even curls around them with her hundred feet. You said that living in Japan

our house was filled with centipedes. I became rather fond of them; I lost my fear. You know, when you kill one, the two halves just walk off.

Surely they played in your mind all the way to your piece “Even the Centipede,”

molded from Ibaraki clay—though you felt in a medium like clay anything can be done;

and stated, I think that’s dangerous. It’s too fluid. Too facile.

Under your instruction, I’ll find what’s too fluid for me and turn my scratching away from facile to fossil

using hammer, chisel, and drill if lucky enough to come across the right quarry and ask nice enough or pay enough

for a crew to blast out the marble—unless the material is residue from something else. Glacial pain?

I mean, glacial moraine

•

from my home near the Sound where a glacier once aborted boulders onto these lean beaches.

I pick up a rock rounded and chipped in the surf, then, back home, like those who set Jizo on boulevard altars in Kyoto,

I tie a bib around its belly then place it on our mantel. Like those women, I, too, remember my baby unborn from betwixt and

Japanese. Japanese like those on the land where dust storms blew farm families to smithereens, then, blew desert

through rows of barracks surrounded by barbed wire and gunner watchtowers. Even orphan babies,

with one drop of Jap blood, were seized from whatever charity to live in bowls of dust. And you, Noguchi-sensei,

volunteered yourself into this incarceration limbo with the goal to build a baseball diamond, swimming pool, and cemetery;

you entered Poston Internment, where you knew yourself a Nisei, that is, without the rights of a citizen: request, of course, denied.

(Not for nothing, you were despised on both sides.) And as for centipedes

I’m not so much afraid as squeamish, which is different, and I’ve never killed one by cutting it in half