Poetry Magazine, Carlos Martinez, February 2003

Poetry Magazine

Carlos Martinez

USA

Spanish eyes

Banished, appropriately it might seem,
to the arts; or, better yet, to not even
waiting tables but washing dishes

and hauling out trash to the alleys
where syllables in any language 
might seem strange, our long,

brown faces seem sad 
and never at rest.
Hispanic-surnamed men who stand

in the frigid shadow of concrete walls,
stand outside of alleys no one else will enter,
stand quietly wondering at the worthlessness

of it all, this cold, cold place where 
wind always blows and no one seems to know 
how to act with kindness or with a modicum of 

social grace, whose words of loneliness
and despair sometimes fall to crack and break 
on city streets and the peculiar syllables 

that Latin lovers call are here 
in these cold northern cities
almost never heard.

What hurt against hot, brown skin blows in
with the winter wind and the frigid, icy stares
of men and women who have no understanding at all

of heat and humid rain, the passion of a restless tongue 
in which expressions of both love and agony come 
easily again and again. For what purpose 

has the long journey been made to a place 
where the trees are bent by blowing winds; 
and the inevitable hate of strangers in the street 

cannot generate  the heat to warm 
these humbled Latin bones or dry the eyes 
of those who weep without shame 

as they stand beneath
buildings that are too gray, 
too cold, too tall.


(Published in An Unendurable Love, a chapbook, 1998, 
Ye Olde Fonte Shoppe Press, New Haven CT)

The pleasure of parenting

It’s the same routine every night: first the children
don’t want to clean their rooms, then they don’t want

to eat whatever’s been cooked for them, then the issue

is baths, they don’t want to take them, then the pajamas
don’t quite fit and the books they want to read aren’t the books

they want to read and then when the lights are out, 

they don’t want to fall asleep even if you lie down with them
and spend an hour or more of the dwindling night

cooing and singing, making comforting parenting noises.

What they do is toss and turn, kick and lash out until
someone somewhere in a darkened bedroom becomes

very loud, the walls hum with anger, the floorboards

rise up as if an earthquake happened, the cats jump from
the end of the bed and scatter, fur sticking straight up,

and the light bulbs shatter. Then the children are offended.

They cross their arms and swivel on their hips 
away from you, facing the wall as if it’s about to open up

and let them in someplace better, where frazzled parents

don’t exist, they can have dessert any hour of the day
or night and school and homework were never invented. 

So the night drags on and you remember when all it took 

was a stern look, a frown, or in desperate situations
a swat on the bottom and then you fell asleep quietly.

Now the children threaten to sue if you touch them, promise

to tell the authorities you are being brutal, their word,
and you know that the heaven’s will part and the gods 

will strike you down because the gods, after all, have a sense of humor

and nothing you can say or do will drain your children of 
their exuberance, the lives they’ll lose soon enough, anyway.