I.

Soft g he tells me. Guadalupe. But he doesn’t know I’ve spent every real part of me already knowing this. And other things to say in bars or in the hallways of abuelas open to the honorary birdcall: sing. Sing and drink pool water.

We’re as far south as you can go without leaving. All the words I know are ways to ask for eggs and ask for dancing. A sliver of a language picture in the tongue sustains me. Nothing translates.

II.

But if it did: the skinny woman I saw four nights in a row on the way to bars- her jawbones through flesh. Four nights of her should make some kind of language shape:

Unapologetic. Of a letter eastward. Or a conscience.

III.

In a tattoo shop east of here, a man swaggers in with a case over his shoulder. It’s a machine gun that can kill over three football fields. And the men agree, She’s lovely, and they roll up their sleeves and say, That’s nice work, nice clean work.

North, a man we love puts his whole paycheck up his nose.

IV.

Soft g, he tells me. Mexico can hear or the northern most reasoning. We’re as far south as you can go without leaving.

Land-the-fuck-locked. Tied to the birdcalls: navy.

They sing and drink pool water. Its been weeks and I am not dead yet not without it.

V.

A sliver of a language picture in the tongue sustains me. Texas. Sweet side. White sky open like six ways to the center. Six ways to love, clean like, proud like, back then in the shape of women, beer in our bellies and the rain comes and we are so young then-

a pear against morning apple of an eye beholding when the rain comes like tearing, except this- nothing about it is violent.

VI.

further east, a man sends a cab for a woman who looks just like me. She gets in. even though it is the middle of the night, she gets in.

abuelo. guadalupe. That is the correct pronunciation. soft g. I know.

nothing translates.