Rayme Waters

The Friendship According to Ruth

We lived in the desert, Naomi and me. My abuelita cleaned her grandmother’s house. My parents died crossing the border when I was two and Naomi’s grandmother said Naomi’s parents were children themselves, which I used to think meant they were just our size and living in a colony, somewhere, with other small adults, but actually they had left baby Naomi with her grandmother for a weekend ten years ago and never came back.

Although Mrs. Foxworthy never encouraged our friendship, Naomi was entertained when I was around. For that bit of peace her grandmother let me come over anytime and took a distant, polite interest in my welfare.

“How is school?” she’d ask, lifting my chin, so my eyes met hers.

I was in fifth grade at Indio Elementary, where even in 1985, our year ended early because the school lacked air conditioning and the windows were rusted shut.

“Oh, Mrs. Foxworthy, Rutie get all the A’s,” my abulita called from the kitchen.

“Is that so?”

“Ruth,” Naomi motioned to me from the door of her room, a board game tucked under her arm.

I pulled my chin from Mrs. Foxworthy’s grasp and turned toward my best friend. We looked nothing alike: she was tall, I was short, she was blonde, I was dark, but the more we talked and let our insides jumble out we were the same. If I liked a book, Naomi had to read it. If she played a game I wanted to learn. Before school had started, we’d nicked our palms with a knife from the kitchen and pressed our blood together. We were sisters, we swore, now and forever. When she outgrew her clothes, they became mine.

“Wanna play Life?” Naomi asked. In the beginning, she won every time. But Naomi competition didn’t matter to her and now I’d figured out the tricks and I was starting to beat her.

“Sure,” I said.

My abuelita and I lived in a sandlot trailer out by the I-10. Sometimes Mrs. Foxworthy let Naomi sleep over.

Naomi loved the desert. Her imagination roared alive in the dunes around my house.

“Look,” she cried pointing toward the horizon—we’d spent the afternoon outside unearthing sun bleached pop-tops and sandblasted bits of plastic, jewelry of our ancestors Naomi insisted— “Do you see the guide who’ll show us the way?”

“Our way to where?”

“Where they wait.”

Did she mean our parents? I squinted, but I couldn’t see what she pointed at. Blowing sand bit at my arms and tumbleweeds bounced across the I-10. It was getting hotter and darker. I took Naomi’s hand and pulled her toward the trailer. The Santana was coming.

A dozen times between October and March, scorched air from the Great Basin howled through the Coachella Valley, shearing palm trees and upending anything not fastened down on its way to the Pacific. Like a sand blizzard, the Santana could disorient, suffocate and bury you. Naomi loved the storms, but I feared them.

That night, the trailer’s awning groaned like the hold of a rusty ark. Loose palm fronds hit as hard as torpedoes. Naomi and I zipped our sleeping bags together on the floor.

“What would happen if I went outside right now?” Naomi whispered, her eyes reflecting light from the veladora my grandma burned during storms.

“Once the Mexicans ruled California, but they went out in a Santana and it blew them away,” I said, repeating the story my grandma told me.

“What if I held one end of a rope and you held the other?” Naomi asked, her voice breathy, halfway to a dream.

In the clear still of morning, it took all our strength to push away a sand drift blocking the door. All of the freeway litter had vanished, and outside was a pristine field of white. Naomi and I lay down, watching the pacific sky, and moved our arms to make angels.

During the next Santana, Naomi called me wanting to know how long it took for the winds that shook me to shake her. Like counting the seconds between lightning and thunder, I’d tell her when a gust hit the trailer and we’d wait to see if the wind cut a straight path from my house to hers.

“I can’t tell,” she said, disappointed in the solidness of her house. “I’d have to be outside to really feel it.”

“Don’t,” I begged, but she went. I held the line, nibbling on the edges of my fingers, wanting to hang up, call for help. Then I heard a door shut, quiet, a thrill in her nighttime whisper “In the Santana, I’m alive.”

At the end of eighth grade, I was offered a scholarship to Valley Day. I started high school with the children of the podiatrists and country club developers and Naomi. At Day, Naomi and I were an odd couple—brown kids and white kids segregated themselves despite the best effort of the staff—but she never gave me up: her elbow linked through mine in the halls so the other girls didn’t push me into the garbage cans, sharing my locker so no one dared scrawl beaner or wetback on it. My friend grew taller and thinner, her skin tan, her hair like August wheat. When you looked at Naomi, you thought: California. I grew to the height of my stooped abuelita and had a pretty smile, but rarely showed it. I was invisible to the boys at school. The other Mexican girls, those who should have had my back, instead called me Tonto. To say tonta, stupid, would have been an outright insult, but by labeling me a sidekick, a sellout, they were going at me just as hard. In the World Book, it said Tonto had saved The Lone Ranger’s life when they were kids, and the Lone Ranger had sworn enduring loyalty. Tonto was intelligent, brave and didn’t waste a lot of time talking. Most important, Tonto was a friend to someone who was otherwise alone.

“Tonto, Tonto,” they whispered at me in the halls.

I shrugged them off. As far as I was concerned their nickname was a compliment and they were too ignorant to know it.

As I climbed up the class ranking, Naomi slid. I was smug in my ability to knock snobby white girls off their perch, but I saw my friend doing more than failing tests. She’d always been a daydreamer, often had the blank look of someone who was elsewhere. Naomi gave up on life not in the sullen way that a teenager might, but in an ethereal way that made me wonder, as she stared out the window sitting next to me in homeroom, if I put my hand out would it pass right through her? As girls in our class got more concerned about their hair, their clothes, beautiful Naomi cared less. If I didn’t urge her to eat, she could sit the whole lunch period, her plaid skirt overlapping mine on the cafeteria bench, not touching her food.

At sixteen, she got recruited at the mall to do makeovers at the Robinson’s Clinique counter. Without working too hard, she sold thousands of dollars of pale powder and pink smear to women who looked like me but wanted to look like her.

“Maybe you could be a Hollywood make-up artist?” I said as she painted my lips with something that made my skin glow, my eyes shine.

Naomi shrugged, putting her chin on my shoulder and smiling into the mirror. “Maybe,” she said.

Our senior year, the college counselor pushed me to go east.

“Your parents were migrant workers?” she’d said barely restraining her glee. “Write your own ticket.”

But, I wasn’t ready to leave. My abuelita’s kidneys were failing. Redlands had an honors program and was close.
“You can do better,” the counselor said, pushing a brochure from Dartmouth, all green grass and leafy trees, across her desk.

I got into UCLA and Berkeley, but chose LA because I could get home faster.

While I helped Naomi get ready for the senior prom I wouldn’t be attending, her grandmother told me what I already knew: Naomi would be lucky to make it to College of the Desert in the fall.

“I suppose you got in on that affirmative action thing,” Mrs. Foxworthy said, leaning against the doorjamb, third drink of the night in her hand, watching me curl Naomi’s hair in the mirror.

“It’s a Regents’ scholarship,” I said. “It’s awarded on merit.”

Mrs. Foxworthy was quiet, then, “Why can’t Naomi be more like you?”

Any answer would be disloyal. I said nothing.

I tried to meet my friend’s eyes in the mirror, but Naomi only looked down. For just a second I saw the Naomi Mrs. Foxworthy saw: vacant, lazy good-for-nothing. I shook my head, less in disagreement than in an effort to wipe clean what I didn’t want to see.

Mrs. Foxworthy left to pour herself another drink. I tried to be angry with her, but I couldn’t. I was worried about Naomi’s future, too.

Releasing the last curl, I let my friend’s golden hair float around her shoulders.

“In every way that matters,” I whispered in her ear, “we’re alike.”

Naomi got caught smoking pot in the janitor’s closet two weeks before graduation and never walked the stage. The heat of her grandmother’s disapproval was scorching and Naomi wisped away further. She quit her mall job and hitched out of town with a guy she met the week after I left for college.

Next I heard from her, she was in Bombay Beach, a huddle of cinderblock shacks and rusted trailers on the edge of the Salton Sea. Naomi’s guy’s name was Tumble, a twenty-something Gulf War vet living on disability. Tumble had a permanent sunburn and a hillbilly accent, but was gentle to Naomi, polite to me and slept out in the hammock when I came to visit, leaving us to whisper ourselves to sleep.

When Naomi saw my Impala coming on Friday afternoons, she’d give Tumble a kiss, then run for a hairbrush, not getting out her snarls but fanning a gossamer layer over the rat’s nest beneath. When she was done, she sat next to me on the square of industrial carpet that served as their front porch, and held my hand while I told her about school. Time in the sun and the desert dust colored her white skin cocoa and made it indistinguishable from mine.

My dulce abuelita died that fall. Under the bell jar of grief—and as invisible at college as I had been at Valley Day—I found it difficult to make friends. But right after Christmas, I met Jorge. He was a junior and the president of MeChA. He gave speeches. He was the defacto leader of us, those he called the people of color, at the university.

“We were once driven out, but our time to reclaim Aztlan comes,” he said during a speech in front of Ackerman Union. His voice broke with emotion that stoked a cheer from the crowd. I went to the library and looked up Aztlan, because I had no idea what he was talking about.

Saturday, he found me after Spanish mass on my knees saying the rosary.

“Who for?” he mouthed.

“Mi abeulita,” I whispered and before I could tell him I was saying a second for my friend Naomi, he knelt down beside me and bowed his head.

A few weeks after we started seeing each other, Jorge knocked on my door and handed me a package wrapped in campus newspaper. “I hate the preppy clothes you wear,” he said. Inside was a Guatemalan-print top. After I insisted, he turned his back as I took off Naomi’s soft oxford and pulled his gift over my skin.

“Now you look more authentic,” he said, pulling me close.

Once I was with Jorge, I didn’t have time to drive out to Bombay Beach. And, the longer I was with him, the more of Naomi’s hand-me-downs went to the back of my closet. The more he lectured me about my natural beauty, the less Clinque I wore. I was afraid he’d disapprove of how close I’d been with a rich white girl, so I played down Naomi’s friendship. I felt guilty—Naomi had told me that Tumble was getting sicker, his muscles and nerves withering from an illness the VA said was in his head—but I was irritated by my guilt. I was finally finding out who I was, and wanted to be with my own kind. Finally a boy liked me. How important was some loser friend anyway?

Even during Spring break, when Jorge went on a march in Sacramento and didn’t ask me to come, I didn’t go see her. Instead, I wandered around the empty campus, lay on my bed looking at my roommate’s New Order poster. After four days alone, I thought about driving out, stopping in Indio to put fresh flowers on my grandma’s grave. But I made excuses: the Impala was sputtering on the freeway; Jorge might call, Tumble didn’t have a phone. But the car had made the same noises for years, Jorge hadn’t called all week and Naomi was always at home, sitting out in front of Tumble’s Airstream, just like I had left her.

When Jorge got back from Sacramento, he had a new girlfriend. Some grandniece of Cesar Chavez. Más auténtica than me, I suppose. And the group that had encircled me like family now cast me out and called me psycho when I left tearful messages on Jorge’s machine. That I had deserted Naomi for this added to my heartache. In the weeks that followed, it was hard to even get out of bed. As the dining hall was too far a distance to go, the Salton Sea seemed impossible.

The Santana blew without mercy that spring, starting fires in Riverside and the LA canyons. Smoke hung over Westwood, making my eyes water. After my last final, I packed up and drove into the Mojave, wanting to apologize to Naomi, wanting to let her know that I would never again let go of my end of the rope.

The winds from the storms had blown lake water up to Tumble’s Airstream, sealing the door with a layer of mud as hard as cement. I balanced on a sun-bleached milk crate and peered in the window. Clean dishes were in the drainer. A board game was laid out on the dinette. I turned around and a bare-chested old man stood on the gravel behind me. I startled, nearly falling. He had a long white beard stained sulfur under his mouth and a Great Dane on a short leash.

“Nobody’s seen ‘em,” he said before I asked. “She and Tumble went off in that last Santa Ana. The VA said there was nothing more they could do. But the girl had it in her head that the storm would cure him.”

The dog considered me, lowered his head and began to nibble his paw.

“That girl had some nice ideas,” the man said, “but they ain’t gonna work in real life.”

Judy Kronenfeld

Blue Bowl of Sky

How we feel about where we are, what our mental image is of the weather and landscape of our days, depends on where we were before, and how we arrived.

I first saw the West of small towns and desert spaces when, very young, and only a few months married, my husband and I drove from the East Coast to start graduate school in Northern California which we approached circuitously, via the Southwest, where he had already been, and where there were ruins he wanted me to see and friends he wanted me to meet. New York City, the densest, most highly urban landscape in the U.S., had been the seemingly infinite center of my childhood and young adult world; when we drove West I left behind my entire family—parents, aunts, uncles and cousins—in the Bronx, Queens, Manhattan and “the Island.” Though the generation above me were almost all immigrants from Europe, only one of them or their children had been as far as Michigan; most hadn’t been west of Pennsylvania.

My husband and I were in that stage of life when buying Melmac plates in beige and aqua at a drugstore—our first dinner service!—was exciting. An only child, marrying and venturing to the edge of the continent, I was shaking off the yoke and protection of my loving but intensely close mother and father (which I had begun to loosen when I chose to go to college in Massachusetts, though my mother had preferred that I stay in “the city.”) All that first year of graduate school, my dad—in those pre-email, pre-cell phone days, when long distance calls (considered too expensive for everyday talk) meant someone had died—sent tapes for me to play on a cheap tape recorder, lugubrious tapes about how much he and mom missed me, his voice thick with incipient tears.

On that first trip to the far West, it was both strange and exhilarating to see towns whose beginnings and endings were visible—compared to the seeming endlessness of building-crowded New York avenues—towns whose dusty streets dropped off into the desert, vulnerable, unprotected, yet brave towns, rubbing up on vast silences. I first saw forests with solitary, articulate pines in receding rows, no fuzzy, obscuring understory—only pine needles—on the ground between them; I liked that independence and clarity. And most of all in that September, once we’d crossed the Rockies, I saw an unobscured horizon; even the suburban and rural parts of the Northeast were so much less panascopic than Western vistas; I saw sky. This was a sky no longer white, close, and hovering; it was as if a great gauze bandage had been lifted from my sight. This sky was an enormous bowl of blue turned over, drenching us in light, dropping out a bit of horizontal detritus: a town, a gas station on an empty road, a collection of rocks.

Of course there had been days in New York when the ocean breezes cleansed the air and it was brisk and crystalline. And, of course, every kind of New York weather was the weather of my childhood and therefore, in my childhood, weather as weather should be. But the horizon in Manhattan (where I went to high school) is devoured by and textured with buildings; the eye is drawn to detail opening onto more detail: walls of glass reflecting sky and cloud, windows capturing and throwing the discus sun. Even outside Manhattan, in the provincial Bronx where I was raised, apartment houses crowd the sky; the eye alights on their crenellated tops, on the aerials stuck like haphazard pins in the pincushions of their tarry roofs. The buildings hold one in like the walls of slot canyons; vistas plunge down them. The sky may be infinitely melancholy at dusk, but it seems to be made that way by the lights coming on in innumerable apartment windows. It is juxtaposed, always, for me, to the mass and might of human architecture, to the vast collection of human souls buzzing tightly in one place. My young husband and I had driven out under a sky that was boss, or god, under an enormous blue bowl where the wind blows without restriction. And after that first trip across the United States, I lived in a new mental space, a new psychological weather, even though the Northern California town near our University, where we rented an apartment during our first year, looked surprisingly seedy for blue and golden California. That unconfined wind seemed to sweep even the slightly cloying familiarity of my natal family from me. I was new when I stepped off the plane on the next summer visit East, into the white haze of air, air palpable on my shoulders as my mother’s hand—which I would now tolerate—brushing some lint from my jacket that I hadn’t asked to be brushed.

I lived in that space, even if—when my husband got a job in Riverside—I was shocked by the aridity and heat of September in Southern California, the sky- and mountain-obscuring smog, especially because he had given me an idyllic verbal scratch ’n sniff with greenery and orange blossoms after his visit the previous May. And I continued to live in that psychological weather system, a blue-gold near desert sparkle, during all the years I drove weekly on the 215 between Iowa Avenue and Mill Street to do my shopping at Fedco—that nude expanse of dusty freeway blowing with trash, unsoftened by trees or grassy median, and, like many Southern California freeways, much uglier than many Eastern highways.

Now I have lived here for decades; my parents have grown old and died; my children have grown up and flown. And even now, when there are more and wider freeways—certainly no prettier—there are days of sky, perhaps especially in the early spring when it is not yet too hot and orange blossom is in the air (at least on the UCR campus), when my mental weather, that Platonic ideal, is realized in the actual, sublunary world. I feel exalted, unleashed, grateful, lost in that cloudless blue that makes me crane my head back to take it in, as if I could never get tired of it, never want argosies of cumulus, or sky-texturing cirrus. It has depth and no depth at the same time. It is a blue so profound it seems to burn, so pure it seems the archetype of the celestial. My head so far back I am dizzy, I look at and into the sky, feeling unadulterated joy, however briefly feeling free.

Cynthia Anderson

Blackbush

Whatever I look at stays with me
long after the looking is over.

Lying in bed, I close my eyes
and see the blackbush I pulled
from the ground this morning.

They came up easily,
brittle wood breaking in my hands,
the pieces added to a growing pile.

The drought has done them in.
They could feed a wildfire,
send flames twenty feet high—
so it’s a matter of clearing.

The way those gray sticks rise
beneath my eyelids, it’s as though
they want to be remembered—

Like ancestors who hold on
because they cannot do otherwise.

Cynthia Anderson lives in the Mojave Desert near Joshua Tree National Park. Her award-winning poems have appeared in journals such as Askew, Dark Matter, Apercus Quarterly, Whale Road, Knot Magazine, and Origami Poems Project. She is the author of five collections—”In the Mojave,” “Desert Dweller,” “Mythic Rockscapes,” and “Shared Visions I” and “Shared Visions II.” She frequently collaborates with her husband, photographer Bill Dahl. Cynthia co-edited the anthology A Bird Black As the Sun: California Poets on Crows & Ravens.

Cynthia Anderson

Shadow of a Hawk

The flank of the mountain
is filled with lupine—
unexpected, the largest stand yet.
Bright afternoon sun
lights the purple slope,
where the hawk’s shadow
glides like a dark window
between this world and the next.
Some will not make it
through this day, shattering
at the sharp fall of the predator.
The survivors will flee, hide,
then emerge despite
the nature of chance.
Every sliver of life glitters
against that black background.

Nancy Scott Campbell

pass the salt

so I examine the grains pure
and bridal white though
forced together by more than convention
I imagine molecules
bonded by initial electro-wrench
somehow all at peace among themselves
waiting to be shaken
darkly dissolved or
as some would suggest divorced

beyond our crystal shaker I picture
the life cycle of salt
a vast residue flat and
leisurely forsaken by perhaps a lake
dregs left to etch this nude swath of desert

heat vertical blur of earth
hoards a body’s brine
parched the human reservoir for tears
dry breath holds a blind sky
no horizon
here no creature grazes
no plant can be seen by a mind looking
for anything ground breaking
such as a formula making clear
secrets of together

Marcyn Clements

Chaparral Ballet

A hummingbird sat quietly on the dead limb of a torrey pine
half burnt by the fire that ran so hot it only took part of the tree

and raced on. A Kingbird unseats the little bird, cocking
his head back and forth looking for larvae or beetles

who come in after a disaster like this and feast on the oozing sap.
The hummingbird swept down to the sage, still blooming by year’s

end and fed in its velvet ears.

Michael J. Cluff

A Royal Raven Near Corona

From the halogen lamp
In the community college parking lot
You look down upon me,
Imperious and coldly correct.
I am never your subject,
Despite what you know.
Avian avarice drives you out.
The choker of inorganic consumption
Compels me sideways
Into another cinderblock stalag
nee Norco College.

You live by caprices;
I, by complicated equations.
Yet the sun still glares
For us both…
Maybe a bit less
For me than, I suspect,
I know
For you.

Rachelle Cruz

Notes On the Round of Return
2/18/11 9:19 pm, Riverside, CA

after Ahmed Abdel Mu’ti Hijazi and Romeo Cruz

Last night I fought cobwebs from my eyes / Last night ‘the House strips funding from Planned Parenthood’

Pearl Square Bahrain/ Tahir Square Egypt / Madison Wisconsin / rained faces call for more than a word /change to land on

The song of mouths / Coyotes yowl outside near the 60 freeway/ I click the button / type my name address email phone number / forward to others / Read/ Write/ Read / The song of mouths

This mouth / Ahmed Abdel Mu’ti Hijazi / A prison is not always a fence and a metal door / It might even be spacious, unbounded…

Prison Is / Prison Is /In Cairo / a father’s left eye blind / his son / a voice crackling against the prison of sky and silence / In Riverside / Silence in the hallways / Silence in the notebook / The freeway rumbles on…

Prison might be an eyelid with dark lashes that we close and tuck under the skin / as we ruminate a dream of life in silences / and hiddeness.

I am singing his round of return / his papyrus song /As if a voice of some kind were calling / My father sends me a poem about Egypt / the father I write about who writes me

Will their cries be more dire/ than their muzzein up that mosque that calls the millions to prayer / to kneel and bow to the ground / looking to the East?

My father’s hand writing / breathing into a Naga sunset window / signs carried above earth to the sky / In Manila / crying Marcos Down! / the night yellow with tear gas / My father’s hands stained / the ink from newspapers he wrote / I am writing this / he has written this / we will write / As if a voice of some kind were calling

Another pharaoh fell to the ground / like the crows but still the pyramids stood mocking us / that we should hold the ground / otherwise they will come tumbling down / if we keep talking of new ideas

Rachelle Cruz

Poem for My Mole

after Joseph Legaspi

Summers
growing up, I tugged
my shorts over my legs
to cover the mole
stuck to the flat of my
upper thigh. Walking
to the pool, I cupped
my hand over it, ashamed
at 13 for not noticing it first.
I wanted to stifle the way
it smoldered from stares,
exacting and blood-shot
from chlorine.
I wanted to scrape it off when
my mother clicked her tongue
at the pinprick full of poison,
possible cancer, a mark
blooming after birth.
Years later,
this is where my lover
pressed his thumb,
stroked it like an onyx
rosary bead, called it
my dark summit,
the sunspot flaring in the
astronomer’s eye,
and before parting my legs,
the pearl before approaching
the sea.

Sheela Free

Casual Prayer

Thwack thwack went Sr. Juanita’s cane
across my pre pubescent knuckles,
thwang thwang jangled the notes
C minor C major-
the black keys resembling the tartar
between her terrifying teeth,
the white ones her jagged canines
“Focus focus”
her passion cried.

Thwack thwack
went Sr. Juanita’s cane
across my hungry hands
tearing the dosa in the hushed lunchroom.
her eyebrows joined furry in a single line
just like the sautéed cilantro strings
caught in my throat.
“Manners manners”
her passion cried.
“Use the knife and fork,
Eat on time, eat on time.”
Tick tock
to her flock.

Thwack thwack went Sr. Juanita’s cane
across my humble hurting hands
Telugu sputtering, foaming
at the corners of my native lips
in the raucous break room.
(Like her many brown starving converted orphans
tucked away behind the school
recoiling from the zeal glinting in her eyes)
“English only, English only,
at Saint Joseph and Mary’s”
her passion cried
her thin lips sealed with fury.

Noonday sun
tropical heatburst
humble hands locked in prayer
for over an hour.
Then,
knees bent with transgression
in the chapel pews
begging for mercy
from the day’s errant ways
Sr. Juanita watching like a hawk.

Evening came in a rain of tears
on the big yellow bully bus
piano book tucked away
behind the shame for all to see
jeering, mocking,
“Sr. Juanita’s pet fool, Sr. Juanita’s pet fool.”

Night came in the folds of home
at last.
Knees on the ground
once again,
“Dear Daddy
Who Art in Heaven
Hallowed be thy name
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done
On earth as it is in Heaven
Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive us our trespasses
As we forgive those that trespass against us
And deliver us from all harm, evil, and temptation
For thine is the kindness, compassion, and joy
Here on earth as it is in Heaven
Dear Saraswati, Goddess of Education
And all things good, help me please
Om Shantih Om.”
Casual prayer of a 6 year old
stiff with terror.

Morning came with soft mercy,
Grandpa (dead daddy’s dad) softy urging
“We’re Hindu and can pray to Christ too
you know.”
Tell that to Sr. Juanita.
The tears gushed thick and troubled
misery spilled out slowly, then hurriedly
out of silent sealed lips.

Recess came with force.
Grandpa,
ethereal in his blinding white muslin dhoti kurta
his forceful turban balanced by the weight of his judgeship
gently reminds Mother Superior
that God hurts not a fly.

At night, the casual prayer continues
as the piano plays in the grieving heart.