Genealogy

A tree of dolts, braggarts, & ghosts. A tree of cotton pickers, migrants, & mop heads hanging from limbs with accusatory branches. My namesakes with their bellies on the ground, dragging themselves from one fence post to the next. My blood with trowels in their hands, pipe in their teeth, paint in their hair, constructing the town, the town snatched from their work gloves. Forced to dig their own graves. In the graves needle tracks, promissory notes, keys to bungalows they didn’t own long enough to see preened. A tree of brawls, drunken sobs, wobbly convictions. A tree with a devil in the bough, the devil who shotguns a can of Miller High Life & flaunts a black mantilla. A tree decorated with the liberty bell of food stamps, dresses brides smuggled out of boutiques in crumpled bras. A city of identical trees police mark as thieves. A tree too tentative to speak & when it did, a work boot’s slur stuck in a drill hole. My people on their backs, the city’s skyline balanced on their mouths. When the dawn blinked its foundation flattened them.

Genealogy [6]

I picture my father in his last days, stitched by inertia to his La-Z-Boy. My brother, who passed on still young, romanced every liquor bottle he could find. He was dashing, with that indiscriminate mouth. My father smoked for forty years but his lungs were clear as guitars. His liver sprouted a grizzled beard. My brother’s face was a sinkhole. I don’t touch the stuff anymore, he said. Lying is also a symptom of ending. One night my father stumbled into my bedroom and accused me of being Freddy Fender. I was ten at the time but could already recognize the funeral music on his breath. My brother sniffed paint in the tool shed. Even in middle school he was already dead. I went out there to watch him once. He was so focused he didn’t notice he cast no silhouette. I recall the palette of his hands, his eyes looking through the wall like a disco ball. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if my father hadn’t been a painter. If his father hadn’t been a sharecropper. And his father before that, trained by a pistol to say I will serve I will serve I will serve.

Rodney Gomez is the author of Arsenal with Praise Song (Orison Books, 2021), recipient of the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for best book of poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters and the Writers’ League of Texas Book Award. His work has appeared in Poetry, New England Review, The Gettysburg Review, Denver Quarterly, North American Review, Verse Daily, and Poetry Daily. His current projects are supported by an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Yale Mellon Arts & Practitioner Fellowship, and a De Groot Foundation grant.