We look at the world once, in childhood.The rest is memory.Louise Glück
These streets birthed a humdrum infancy,a Salvadoran consistency.The calmness of tortillas, thick, our own,unlike the ones next door. Doña Martahauled her comál from northern Mexicoin a sling of Spanish way too loudfor subversion (our specialty,the guerrilla-sweetened tongue,the you—not formal, not Usted,not even tú—but vos, which meansI’ll give my life for you).This was a colony of Morazán,where the first-born sonsof the massacre of 1932survived and trained and slipped back home and won.It’s different now. A god’s moved inall googly-eyed. Café chapels risefrom pupusería bones.The homegrown scat up Shotwell Streetamong the humpback Siliconswho curve their privileged spines over their cellsin this downloaded San Francisco hell.The Mission’s done. Van Ness is boutiqued-up.Take 18th to Capp. My whores are gone,the girls who swept their fingers down my cheekwhen I was oneand kissed my grandmamáwho strolled me in a geriatric strut.But, there are echoes here.707 Capp, my first address,my Bethlehem, where the women gathered round,Mamá, cousin Marina, all the sexy auntswho cooed at the half-breed babeand made him whole. The groundnever shifted here. The chronic caressof macho-training women made it clearthey’d kill for me. Then Daddy took us away,to the U.S. South, his home turf, the landof my other, milky skin.And there you waited, in our Appalachian hills,Your hunting ground,when I, five, was in season for a year.Which is why I’m here,in this trigger-homeof all my Latino-ness, not to rechargebut to create, from memory,memory—a survival tactic for the bloodline-bruisedthat I have used for forty-seven years.The odors first: Give me the drunkard’s pissthat runs the curbbelow the wood-spoke wheels of a taco cart,and leather meat that hangs off hooksand coffee breath of kind caballeroswho always need a shaveand do not crave.And Oh! I hear the howlfrom Fillmore Streetthat sings into my nineteen sixty-four,and makes all love all good.And I taste my uncle’s weedand breathe in all the vos-es that I can,with their blend of cigarettes and martyrdomand I hear all the heartbeatsof this barrio, the battle drumsof Salvadoran love, and I celebrate ourselvesand sing ourselves, for what belongs to usdoes not belong to you.