Speedy Gonzalez: An Appreciation


The mouse was brown. And I was brown. 
He was a Gonzalez. And I was a González.
We were both Mexican, though the Mexicans
I knew didn’t wear sombreros or walk around in white.
Maybe in the old Pancho Villa movies
with peasants who couldn’t grow mustaches.
When they rallied they blinded the screen like snow.
Their villages so different from the cartoon ghost towns
with a lone cantina and bored mice puffing on cigarettes,
all of them male. “What is it, a gay bar?” my father asked.

Speedy, the only one who could outrun el Señor Gato,
embarrassed my father with his battlecries
¡Ándale, ándale, arriba, arriba! which made no sense.
“And who is the cat supposed to be? La migra?”
No Mexican can run that fast, my father said.
Nor any mouse. A sharp snap in the middle of night
meant a rodent got its neck broken by the trap.
What did my mother use to entice it since here,
in our U.S. house, the only cheese I ever saw was on TV, 
thick wedges that pointed to the mouths of cartoon mice.

Yet my father and I still watched side by side
as Speedy Gonzalez bolted without losing his hat.
It was all make-believe anyway, this strange México
where the poor had to take from the rich. We knew
about rising early for our meal, and cooking up
the swap meet pumpkins given out for free on Halloween.
No lazy Mexicans here, Señor Gringo, even if you peek
through the cracked window and catch us sitting there,
waiting for the only Spanish words we will hear on TV,
waiting for the mouse band to bring music from so far away.










Federico García Lorca: A Quinceañera


Mouse pierces shadow of mouse. 
Pellets where dawn has hatched its ghosts. 

Keep sacred, cigarette. 
The vigil goes dead without the smoke. 

Your tongue trembles beneath the fig. 
Think paperweight and swallow. 

Two answers bored the skull: 
The limitless love, the bullet hole. 

Widowhood consumes the bedroom.	
Drunk the thief who kicks the door. 

For mass, let’s dress in wax. 
Ear to the bell, wail out through the rope. 

Moon from the sea’s frothed mirror. 
Sun from the brothel, hell in tow. 

Onan’s ink drop: spill to watch it grow.