Pre-Pubescent Ruminations
from a Tree
I wanted more than dust-speckled
dreams and a Daddy who hollered
red-spotted commands through a
summer-screen door. That time of
day, the afternoon brought about
only contempt for man-made time.The
sun hung from a noose above our
heads and I counted minutes like
years. Even our dogs draped their
furrowed brows low in defeat.
I was hoping for some type of
happiness that might roll in on the
back of a southern breeze or the
slow strut of a Tex-Mex caballero, a
border dwelling ranch hand who could
dip his tongue into a sweet batch of
Spanglish just for me. He would be a
romance telenovela in the flesh, one
that I couldnft comprehend because I
never did speak Spanish anyways.
Nonetheless, my caballero would roll
a cinnamonflavored toothpick between
a pair of purple-scented Mestizo
lips, a fatter cigarillo between his
fingers.
I spent those summer days chewing on
dusty pinon shells and wondering
what another tongue in my mouth
might taste like. I spat the shells
to the ground and they glistened
with my saliva. I spent the idle
hours cradled by the branches of my
front-yard tree reading about sex in
slow whispers and the grind of bark
against the back of my thighs. The
v-cut shape of a book embedded into
the skin, right where my jeans met
in the middle of me and me and into
me. Had my father ever known the
types of thoughts I had slinking
about my adolescent brain, he would
have cut my very legs so that I may
never have left the yard. He would
have rattle-chained me to the fence
and shorn my hair like a boy. He
would have tamed my fire tongue of
heat and flame and root by plucking
it out and burying it in the
backyard. He would have taken the
blood for himself if he couldfve.
If he could have.
Or at least thatfs how I always
figured it.
You could tell me otherwise, but I
wouldnft believe you.
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