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Court Castaños

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Burn Rising

Yesterday, Blake asked me, what are you doing
with your hands today? I opened them, read:
too clean, too dry. And remembered these
hands, just seven years old,
aimed for his eye, glasses and all, socked
it red, puffed, like a burn rising.
Blake Gollmer, my best friend, and his betrayal:
an illegal and devastating sly-tackle
during a neighborhood game, some street sport.
It’d been another day of slinking along fences
under the thick bosom of the Fresno sun.
Stealing cans of cold soda-pop, fresh from
Antarctica, melting, sweating in
our dusted, splinter fed, kid hands.
What did we know? Nothing. Everything.
Strutting smooth, like cats atop the fences,
spying into neighbors’ yards, daring
each other to jump off backwards. All
cap-guns and striped socks, scabbed knees.
Hawking loogies, burping the ABCs, skidding
our bike tires clean of tread, now tar and smoke.
Here in the fig branches we crow. Here lizard bellies
flash blue among the yellow death foxtails.
Here you can fly, feel the air wash from burnt
to cool over your sticky tongue, the street long enough,
run until you can’t hear your mom calling anymore.
My best friend. Three years older and cooler than me,
swallowed hard and held his breath before
trading me his best marble for the green light
to smash mine. But mine was junk from Longs Drugs,
his had belonged to his dead Grandpa, beloved,
purple with white swirls like the stormy clouds of
Jupiter. Mercury too, liquid mercury, the rumors,
This is from the Terminator movie! Swear to God!
Poured into the gutter, a silver mirror quaking,
and us poking it with sticks, dividing it
into tiny bbs, If you touch them you’ll die,
he warned. Kids. Always experts, eyes wide open,
in awe of the forbidden milk.

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Year Of The Rat Again

A family of rats has moved into our heating vents.
I felt a cloudburst in my belly. A cold, guilty downpour
when I called the pound to enquire about barn cats.
My whole life rats are always nesting with me.
I was born in the Year of the Rat and when
I found out, I was five, and I was eating egg drop soup.
A Ming’s Restaurant specialty. The Chinese calendar
printed on my placemat. I hoped to be a dragon or a tiger.
All red and gold type, Mom read it aloud, 1984,
Ah ha! You’re a rat! That didn’t sound so good
to me. My nose was already a weird shape,
I didn’t need people to identify it as a rat nose.
Would I grow a sharp, little overbite? Wild eyes?
The rat was always the sneaky, selfish
character in the stories. I wanted to be a lion
or a bear. A big, strong animal, untouchable.
Me? A rat? I have always been afraid of rat tails, both
the hair style and the actual appendages give
me chills of revulsion. I once dated a boy whose
dad still had a rat tail, even though it wasn’t the eighties
or nineties anymore. A kind man with a good heart.
I worried people would be cruel, wield their gavels.
His wife would brush his rat tail for him
and braid it at night. My boyfriend loved to proclaim,
My dad has a rat tail! A point of pride. Now,
when we turn on the heater, our house smells
like rats. Wood rats, to be clear. They are
very cute, big eyes, white bellies, shy, friendly.
A professor once told me that wood rats make the best
pets. I guess I know that intimately now. I realize that
they actually make the smelliest pets. The most hard
to evict tenants. The loudest upstairs neighbors.
When I was a kid a big family of rats lived
under my bed. They had babies and I loved them.
I’d dip my hand beneath my bed each morning and
scoop up a tiny puff ball, clutch it close to my chest.
Nuzzle its down with my nose and listen,
the strong, electric heartbeat
quaking in my hands.

__________

Court Castaños grew up adventuring along the Kings River in the San Joaquin Valley. After moving to Santa Cruz to study art Castaños now spends time writing poetry and exploring the redwoods.

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