PS_Fall_2012_PS Summer 8/26/12 9:02 PM Page 21
i g l o o
Sestina for El Barrio By Angela Canales Under a pale sun, a dark-haired woman sweeps glass smashed in last night’s brawl. Scattered shards are edged in blood. Across the street a boy dribbles a ball—a steady beat like fired shots. The woman brushes silt and sings: mi amor volverá (my love will come back). Around the corner, Pacho leans back and lights another smoke. His thick glasses make him look startled. A song crackles under a needle as he arranges scattered photographs. A solitaire hand that beats him every time. He wears his son’s crucifix. His only boy, first caught in crossfire and then a crowded E.R. Shouts for back-up, a gurney, a god had filled ellipses beating from monitors. Finally, his son’s eyes had glassed over. Pacho gathers the pictures, scattering his ashes on the floor… Down the block a song rises from St. Michael’s church. A song about a shepherd who bled from a cross and promised salvation to his scattered flock. Two boys lounge in a back pew. Figures plead in panes of glass. Candle shadows shimmy like girls. Qué ritmo, they crack, craving the bass beats that boom from cars. It’s always the same song. The priest pours wine into the chalice studded with glass as voices climb the steeple’s cross and pierce the sky. On stone ledges, birds back away as a gust scatters dust and leaves. Then they burst—scattering up like cards after drunk fists beat down… Pacho sticks the needle back into its track. From idling cars, songs unfurl like skulls and cross-bones. The woman at her window slides her glass. Cross now, she beats the sill, scattering curses. (It’s always the same song.) The boys saunter off, caps on backward, the grooves of their soles glistening with stained glass. Angela Canales is a high school educator, freelance editor, translator and writer. She earned her master’s in Writing Studies from St. Joseph’s University, and her story “Out of Nowhere” was included in the 2009 anthology The Best of Philadelphia Stories: Volume 2. Most recently, she was included in the 2012 cast of Listen to Your Mother, a national 10-city reading series exploring the bond between mothers and children.
couch, making me breakfast and lunch and filling up the tub for my baths. My grandmother, her gray hair in plastic curlers, came over every day to do laundry and eat dinner with us and take a bowl of soup to my mom. Sometimes, I saw my grandmother wiping her eyes with a handkerchief, and other times Aunt Clair stared straight ahead and didn’t hear the phone ring or me asking her a question. They took me to the park a couple of times, but I just climbed the wooden steps in my flip-flops and loosely gripped the monkey bars. It didn’t seem right to have fun when your brother was dead. I missed David, but I still talked to him in my bedroom at night when everything was dark. He always appeared in his snowsuit, blowing into a paper cup. Steam rose in the shape of an O. I hate him, he said, referring to Bill, who had started to come over each day and spend long hours in Mom’s room. Why can’t he just go away and stop coming back? Mom loves him, I heard myself whisper. Maybe he makes her feel better. David shook his head. She has another kid, you know, and he nodded in my direction. I stared back. He’s not our real father, David said. She should stop pretending. I shrugged. At least Bill comes back. I’m going to find him, Shelley, David said, and I knew he wasn’t talking about Bill. He started to fade into nothingness again as I closed my eyes. Maybe that’s why I died.
l My mom didn’t leave her room for days, but finally, on a Friday afternoon when Bill went to the store and Aunt Clair sat with me playing Legos, she appeared in the doorway to the living
21
