Naomi Ayala   SECRETS They tore your pockets into large whispering mouths, backed up your dreams, crawled under your mattress and shook the bed at night. They were the lead in your shoes, a lost watch in threadbare dawns. I woke with you and cried with you. I watched you sleep under the broken moonlight of the trees-- one eye keeping guard as if the sky had eyes and leaves could speak, roots cough themselves out of the earth screaming. You waited away the years for all the if's that turned loose doorknobs in the middle of the night to burst into your hiding.   EL PLACER DE LA PALABRA The pleasure of your speaking. The loud rivers of your speaking. The soft, bending arch of recognition between your smile & the speed of busy hands at the salary of a cab, bus, in the restaurant of our millionaire ambition minimum-waged into this narrow small-breathing dream we call a golden country. Azúcar negra. Brown sugar. Te quiero. I love your speaking. I go with loving rhythm through the revolving door of days spent moving without moving. I find you & my ear is a blackhole for the music of your dancing tongue. My body is a blackhole. If I carry home on my back-- crawling into foxholes into the safeway of night-- when I pass you carrying all you have on your own hardened back, your words bring the cool sweat to the heat of my daily life. And, I stop to court you, azúcar negra, brown sugar, your tongue to drink of your crystal clear music. Ruth Bolduan Pandora oil on canvas, 22" x 18", (1994) more work by Ruth Bolduan     THE NIGHT I WALK INTO TOWN The night I walk into town to meet my brother I'm tripped up by a car whose wheels rip through a newspaper along the white line of the road. The black bold type is bleeding. I scream but the bleeding doesn't stop. At the corner a man who hasn't seen water, food, gloved fingers this cold, snow-blowing January asks hoe many faces do I see holding his chin up. Twenty-five, I say twenty-five thousand.     POVERTY It gives you pigeon eyes, makes you brave as a cracked slate with all the weight of a house on top. It bids you hold out your quaky hand through bittersweet temptations. You dream of it as slick silvery fish between your hands wide eyed & breathless but it circles your bleeding feet like sharks. At evening time between lampposts & garbage drums turned over in the wind, poverty is black ice... or a train, whose departure you miss, whistling at you in the distance. Your will is chalky on your tongue like aspirin & patience hangs like frayed dreads down your back. Morning bends the scalpel-sharp pain in the rib cage, love's sulfur-dazed eyes. Two tea bags in your wallet for when the day is done & poverty at your feet like a hungry dog laps up the sweat of your calves. You come & go not speaking fumbling for a ripcord through a thousand leagues of wild wind.     SWEEPING This morning, in Fundeci the breadman's basket weighed him down & his call was a broken bird's. This morning, the broom man came at five a.m. crying ¡Escobas! ¡Escobas! as if he hadn't slept all night, as if he had been crying Sorrow! Murder! It is so many years before a war is over. Yesterday in Fundeci a woman swept in front of her house, hills reflected on the sweat at the curve of her back, and her boy, the boy who dug up dead bullets from the swollen earth of nearby yards, found one he hammered into life. It traveled between his eyes, only blocks away from her. This afternoon she sweeps in long, steady strokes as if she were crying The heat! The sweltering heat!, meaning to come up for air.   LAWNS the magnolia tree I've claimed in full April bloom & come visit is in someone else's yard, has a surname that corresponds to a playpen of a parcel & its owner and I think that lawns are a concept of colonialist empires, that hedges symbolize prisons beautified fences you cannot cross like straps for oxen they tighten around the back of the eyes of your soul, wrap & bear weight leave open sores to become the landing strips of flies I have turned organic fences & frontyards in my dreams over & over--a country-full and know they become walls against their will rebel by growing every which way so often in the middle of the dark that only blades can trim their constant disobedience     Naomi Ayala is a poet, educator, and community activist. She makes her residence in Washington, DC where, until recently, she served as the coordinator for curriculum and instruction at the National Council of La Raza's Center for Community Educational Excellence. She is currently the Program Director of Celebra la Ciencia: Changing the Face of Science, a community science festivals project bringing science resources to Latino communities in six cities across the US. Ayala is the author of Wild Animals on the Moon (Curbstone Press), selected by the New York City Public Library as one of 1999's Books for the Teen Age. Her poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals in the US and beyond, including Callaloo, The Village Voice, The Caribbean Writer, The Massachusetts Review, Red River, the Potomac Review, and Hanging Loose. Ayala migrated from Puerto Rico as an adolescent in the late 1970s to New Haven, Connecticut, where she remained until 1997. She is the recipient of the 2001 Larry Neal Writers Award for Poetry from the DC Commission on the Arts, the Connecticut Latinas in Leadership Award, the Trailblazer Arts Award, and the 2000 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Legacy of Environmental Justice Award. Published in Volume 3, Number 3, Summer 2002.   Read more by this author: Ayala's Tribute to Paul Lawrence Dunbar: The Memorial Issue Naomi Ayala's Intro to Vol. 6, No. 2 (Spring 2005) Naomi Ayala: DC Places Issue Naomi Ayala: Split This Rock Issue Naomi Ayala: Tenth Anniversary Issue