syllable knots & milkweed—

In full sun ginger will roll up: crinkles might be the word for leaf movement. Everything around it curled & hot—.
What I’m saying is about Texas sun, which is Mexican sun. Perhaps you are familiar with this kinda heat.
In the courtyard I sit with my left foot callused & my sole visible—to Martin the Cholo with his blue khakis yanked down to his fat white calves, but he’s fixed on the sprawling strawberry drooling its yellow ooze down his thigh.
A fat patch of pubes sneaks over elastic banding his undershorts, striped blue & soaked enough to see thru.
He told me about his father. Or was telling me on our bikes when we crashed with our backpacks full of books & water, a couple of tacos—yes, Mexicans with tacos in their satchels in Texas, under the whole sun, on blue lowrider bikes.
When he fell, I was 24. Homeboy: 29.
“Toma.” I handed him the hose. “Here.”
“Fuuuuuuuuk, guey. It hurts. ay, ay ay ay ay”—the syllable knot exits his lips. Water besets his thick-ass, big, tree-trunk thighs so deeply that I give no fucks as I lay back in my lawn chair, feet thrown up like two birds, even my fucked-up foot with its hardened parts & its sins.
I don’t know how I do it.
I don’t know how but I bring these vatos over to my duplex with my dogs & my plants, naming the golden goddess & Buddha’s belly, black bamboo, too, the Mexican firebush & silverado sage, pride of Barbados, milkweed, ginger, & mistflower—like any one of these vatos might give a good shit about things that grow out of the ground & live for the sun once my tongue starts planting itself in his mouth, promising him shit he’s never seen—.