Chrome

Years he lives alone on Montezuma Road. Delivers newspapers
during dawn’s darkest hours. Marine layer hangs like gunfire
over the Gulf of Tonkin. Optical illusion: how cleverly the war begins
in his ’93 Mazda MPV. We sail I-15 South as though it’s the Thu B?n River,
flee H?i An’s cinnamon-forest barricade, viscera-flooded streets.
American soldiers peeling his house apart, straw by straw.
His uncles wearing nothing but nametags around their necks, lying
in a ditch of saw-toothed rocks. Flies spewing from a missing eye.
We grab doughnuts at a panaderia in North Park. A stereo beneath
La Virgen croons “Como la Flor” while I probe a glazed exit wound:
wedding ring he never gave my mother. Too poor for love, too ruined
for ritual. I dance with him. My feet atop his feet, shadow in his shadow.
Our song doesn’t end even when it does, even when Yolanda pushes a bullet
through Selena’s back. We keep going. We remount his chrome motorboat
as daylight singes sheets of warm air, revealing another imitation of Heaven.
My father in the rearview mirror: sky I go blind scouring for the sun.