Chicken Bones

By Naomi Ayala

Chicken Bones, I can hear your skeleton weeping

like it was five a.m. and hailing.

Your procession of clickety-clocks now

a flatbed leaping into potholes.

I am not a scarecrow heart.

You can feed off my shadow

where there’s music.

Boogey down Spanish Avenue, Anywhere, USA

so bold and beautiful like you used to.

Your mobile of spite words

twirling in that wild wind tease that lifts

above the New York skyline

above today’s cumulus.

Pedro never knew where the news was at

but today he says he saw you

leaving my house for the station

like you weren’t ever coming back.

I said you were visiting

with all the skinny folk in the world down south

a special sancocho recipe from Loasa witchu

for the infamously weak of bones.

Mami, she don’t say you’re nasty anymore

on account you ain’t around to talk like you used to

but, it’s ungodly, she says, gripping

her wild Puerto Rican heart, ungodly

those sounds he used to make like every

body-seeking spirit haunting your bedside cross

on All Soul’s Day.

The trouble with my folks is they think

because there ain’t so much of you to look at now

you ain’t really around when you are.

When you really gone, we don’t feel you here

it’s worse, Bones

like a clap out of time.

Yesterday, I told cousin Kiko

you showed up outta nowhere

and I took you dancing and you danced

like the island had been declared free or something

like there was enough rice and beans for the whole

Northeast corridor poor of this country.

Don’t care he says I lied.

Don’t care I don’t know where you are.

Don’t care you promised to write and didn’t.

I can hear your skeleton weeping

your clickety-clock bones

and know you must be dancing.

This Side of Early

Poems by Naomi Ayala

Naomi Ayala’s poems explore wide-ranging themes in an ever-changing landscape—from the city streets to the introspective solace of the woods. These lyrics deconstruct the political world of man, offer hope through a compelling, lyrical, spiritual intimacy, and bridge the gap between the two with words full of ecological intensity.

Her deep connections with the working class combine with a love of the land to offer us lilt and dream, revelation and foretelling.

In This Side of Early, Naomi Ayala exhibits astonishing range, proving that great poetry is worth waiting for. Like Whitman, Ayala contains multitudes; she is a poet with an ethereal vision of another world, and a woman with a sweet hope for this one: “Drink from this tree/and ye shall be saved."—Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of Red Clay Suite

Hole

                 By Naomi Ayala

One morning
they dig up the sidewalk and leave.
No sign of the truck—only the large,
dark shadow digging and digging,
piling up sludge with a hand shovel
beside the only tree.
Two o’clock I come by
and he’s slumbering in the grass beside rat holes.
Three and he’s stretched across a jagged stonewall,
folded hands tucked beneath one ear—
a beautiful young boy smiling,
not the heavy, large shadow who can’t breathe.
Four-thirty and the August heat
takes one down here.
He’s pulled up an elbow joint
some three feet round.
At seven I head home for the night,
pass the fresh gravel mound,
a soft footprint near the manhole
like the “x” abuelo would place beside his name
all the years he couldn’t write.