Necromancing

I. Devil's Cup

The devil drinking horchata

from the clay-glazed cups in my kitchen.

He wraps his claws around

them lightly pausing before he raises

rice-drink boiling to his lips.

He stirs the tattered white sip

with his finger looking over to me for a word.

I am thinking milk's breath, a memory,

of sitting in my grandmother's soft lap

fingering her wool-knit shawl, hooking

the needle through the top layer of my skin

until I bleed. Something more painful

than her funeral, how my grandfather drank

whiskey until he fell over her cold

body weeping. They pulled him

from her stunned. I am thinking

of memory's warm neck

breaking to cradle the cold

body of the world, the way

you clip the hard stem

of a flower in two. Lactiferous.

Yes, he says, this

this is your devious

heart's word.

II. Bougainvillea

Before I knew it waved its head like a mane

through someone's summer,

I would read it in a poem and think

brown like small unnamed birds

tucking twice about its bushel

for shade, the day my sister ran from home

leaving the rest of us to walk our circles

for an answer. No one in the family spoke. This word

was hot days catching

tumbleweed dead in its throat,

brown. I wanted to hit her

with my fist and decided I would not speak

to her even if she held me, even if she came home

and held me. I wouldn't have stopped

pulling the plants in her garden,

rabbitbrush, goldenrod, firewheel,

the owl's clove brimming with accusation, except

my mother asked me, please

save the boganvílias. I was surprised

when I saw what they were.

I wanted to be the wind blowing dark

their royal blooms the way a bruise is beautiful—

the red sunset, a blue watermark soaking

its skin. Blue as alegria, azul as the night's cushion

from space, its clumsy twilight

running over the jagged floating world.

III. Not a Red Planet

The night owl's talon has caught its brown mouse

whose one thought is a clover-tipped star

sinking into the night that is a loneliness

before its death. Blue rain washes

the world like a plastic. Dripping, the owl

snaps bones into the small cacophonic fuss of TV's

and my brother is yelling fucking Mars' not a red

planet at all. He throws his scotch glass

and cries. I open the windows to rain,

to the heavy shucking wind outside.

I am waiting for him to pass into his small

brown dreams. For the rain to stop drumming

light like star-glass over streets.

IV. Widow Music

The trumpet has the soft brass tongue of a hummingbird

                  deviant in the flower as it drapes

                              slenderly over the dark

                  curves of A-minor

melodic. I practice late until

the heavy golden light becomes a voice—

                  my sad mother singing

                              me for a husband

                  while he is away. I am worried

                                        she will never be with anyone

but me. I hear her low-glowing carom

against the scale and decide

                              if music is made from solitude

                  like the night—its cello trunks moaning

                                        through wooden throats, the hot bow-light

breathing

                  as it plays every sorrow from the body—

                              then nothing will draw it from us

                  because nothing music summons ever dies,

its notes like fevers rising

slow as a mouthpiece over the world.