Baby Got Wings

by Larry Duncan

I’ve never been happier to see you go.
Your suitcase packed with mammy dolls
chickens for sacrifice and all the words
you never say out loud
typed out on clean, white paper.

I know it wasn’t easy.
We slept late,
had to hustle,
and you got lost
on the way to the airport.
The directions didn’t lead where they said they would.
There were black dogs outside the terminal.
A man in uniform took your boarding pass
and passport and I bet for a moment
you thought he was never coming back,
that you’d be stuck
on the curb with your bags,
with the taxis pulling up and away,
the traffic circling,
with all the embraces and the release,
stuck for the rest of your life
between the coming and going
until the time ran out.

But you made it baby
through security
and the long lines
and the bag check
to the airport bar
for few drinks to settle your nerves
before walking the long hall
to the fuselage.

And I can see you now,
nervous as always on the liftoff,
reaching for my hand
And finding the hard plastic armrest
and its useless ashtray,
thinking of contingency plans,
of the distance between your seat
and the emergency exit,
of mechanical error
and the lengths you'd go
and what it's worth
and where you’d land
in the finality of fire and twisted metal
as you lift
up and out
of California.

Lost in Tijuana

by Larry Duncan

She’s draped over a stool,
her back against the bar,
elbows resting on the edge.
One leg crossed over the other,
kicking in my direction.

Jeans and red tube top
fit like a second skin
and a pretty face—
almond eyes and sticky,
candy apples lips.

She reminds me of S,
who reminds me of M.
They were roommates.
I wanted S.  M wanted me.
We spun around in that circle
for years until I broke
off and crashed into N,
burying myself in the couch
of her Georgia trailer,
where I huddled every night,
thin and twitching,
in the cold light of the television,
waiting for her to come back home,
and she’d slide in from the front door
to the bathroom with a backhand
wave, waiting for me to ask
where’d she’d been until
she stopped coming home at all
and I enlisted in the Navy
so I could stop coming home, too
and took to walking at night
when I couldn’t sleep,
farther and farther
from the shipyard
to bars and strip clubs
and ran into A,
who danced every night
in that shitty club outside of PB,
who stripped and splayed herself on stage
and no one ever saw her,
who hated men
and their slack jaw faces
and said sailors were the worst
but I was different,
who buried her cat in the backyard
after it was hit by a car
and she cried in the dirt,
clawing out a grave
with her bare hands,
who was a girl
like any other girl
and who’s her heart I broke
like any other heart
because she was wrong
because I wasn’t different,
I was worse,
which leads to J
who honestly believed I was someone else,
so much so, I couldn’t help but believe it too
and I spent a year cramming
myself into the confines of that vision
and another pinched into that frame,
waging a cowardly, guerilla war
to break free and finally arriving at
R—R—R and her house a hundred
miles north in the hills over Fullerton,
who after months of correspondence
over the internet and the phone
finally agreed to meet me,
who loves my rustic body
and has book shelves,
a mortgage and everything,
who played Trivial Pursuit with me
while her friends argued about politics,
kneeling in front of couch
while I sat on the cushin
with my hands hugging a beer
between my legs
as we passed the box of questions back and forth
not bothering to move the pieces,
who I hugged on brick steps of her porch
when I left and we almost kissed,
who I barely know,
whose last name means thief,
whose house I can’t quite remember
how to get back to,
but is where I want to go,
to drive, drive north, drive all the way to Fullerton,
drunk and crazy in the middle of the night,
to arrive at her front door, knock, and say,
“I should have kissed you.
I wanted to kiss you.
I want to kiss you,”
R who was born in Mexico City,
who called me on my way down to San Diego
and when I told her I might go to Mexico said,
“Tijuana is not Mexico.
It’s something else.
It’s a border town.”

They are there in her almond eyes.
They are letters in a word
tattooed just beneath my skin.