Littlestalks Sarah Torribio Litrus Advisor Alone with my poems
I arrange the flower stalks of words
in such a way that my mother-in-law
says, “This daughter will always take care of me”
and my man exclaims, “What surprising fireworks lie
between the unexplored thighs of this woman’s mind!”
And I say little, as the work of my hands is untranslatable
except in the language of flower stalks, which is understood
only by one South American tribe that grows lonelier each year
as its membership of twenty-seven—thirty if you count Ohtli who,
like his name, has taken to the road and only brings his mestizo wife,
Virgie, and son to visit when the Norteamericano tourists who buy his aguas
frescas and cheap woven purses begin to thin—diminishes with the toll taken by
the disease that turns blood to sugar and makes toes rot off feet like overripe limes
and the lure of cities bustling with free market wages and music pouring from outlets
jury-rigged to accommodate rock and roll as well as bulbs more bare than the breasts of
women in the village, at least until an idea called nakedness was imported along with the
T-shirts that have trickled slow down the equator, like sticky coca-cola, until the toothless
man who jumpstarts a boat from which vacationers fish wears, with less irony than a stick
of firewood, a shirt made for fans of The Who, worn soft and proclaiming that, at least in
the Year of our Lord 1979, “The Kids are Alright.”
I am lonely, too, and
my irony is also no more
than a stick of firewood.
Because whether I stake words
like ferns next to the demurely closed
buds of roses or next to suggestively open
orchids or use them to cool the sunset-colored
flames of gladioli, the stalks pant toward beauty,
even when I am careless and break the necks of the
most fragile flowers, just at the base of their gasping blooms,
the stalks insist on their own order, thrashing out unanswerable
arguments like, “Does red really clash with pink?” and “Do orange
and magenta combined call up memories of the barges that once floated
, heavy with flowers, through the waters of Xochimilco or do they instead evoke
a circus-themed casino known for low prices, food poisoning buffet binges,
clowns smiling on men who buy women who sell themselves and juegos
so bright and tempting you don’t know which you should clutch
more tightly, your wallet or your child?”
Always, always, the stalks whisper
their order to me and then say
something that, though nearly
untranslatable, sounds like,
“Look at us. What you
have made is right