Alfaro

Bio
Benjamin Alfaro is a writer, organizer, and educator from Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is a writer-in-residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit. His work has appeared in several Michigan-based anthologies, Red Cedar Review, and on the HBO Original Series 'Brave New Voices.' He is a co-founder of WayneSLAM on the campus of Wayne State University and a co-founder of the statewide youth poetry festival, 'Michigan Louder Than a Bomb.' His second collection of poems, Home Court, will be released this fall on Red Beard Press. He lives in Detroit.

$3 Poems by Benjamin Alfaro Namesake I. My mother answers the phone, chews the inherited A between her teeth, rending it down like a gristly cut of meat: el ferro she says, arduously. An anchor, I think. A pearl smoke gambols loose from a narrow chimney of lips. She grits a rustle of bicuspids as it leaves. My father's name etched from bulbous vowels. Her name built on keel deck, spit shined on boats made of old money: Copper. Lumber. Salt. Other times, it is el faro. A lighthouse, I imagine. Piloting the water of a bad voyage. Steered single, dried liver black. Tongue, a cutting beam she remembers in memoir, in flashes of light. II. So much depends upon the temperature of a vowel. The drawing of maps. III. This name is no timid wick. It is birch bark from the oldest tree on Vernor. The Boulevard. In Sahuayo. No-name chicano. Lessons in a litany of songs. This name is a lean-to propped in throat, on fire. Blazing a tremble. It is a mariachi tuning metal fret guitarras. Hummed language. It is distant and vessel. Canal of gum line. My name is a carving knife that offers the most important lesson as it cuts my teeth. Building Juan My tío tells me his brother is a fiction. Sixty-seven years and two terms a stationed medic averse Vietcong strung in canopy. How war lingered into our living room carpet. Unclean, pinned beneath each bristle. The nights torn agape by tracer fire or frantic car alarms in a well-lit parking lot. Foreign behind a gated subdivision, I wish I could purge the abundant mess. Could clean my memories of sticky sap that smelled of coagulated blood mopped each morning before cartoons. A lost set of keys. A phone number to ring his mother after sundown, implored to shield pending swings. Timely deterrents, whatever would clear the air. I'd stake out clearance, sequestered in bedroom. Pine for clues to circumvent his antics, like breathing patterns when he'd pass out early. My tío asks rhetorically over the phone what can't drudge itself to poison? I can't find where the line demarcates hindsight from regret, how long before a defense hardens into camouflage like habit. Scrub clean dysentery spooled across kitchen sink. Make sure the door is locked. Hang up the phone. Stopped looking for his obituary in the newspaper lately. Wonder if now the descent took its time to grow me into a shrewd leather. Recall with honor the man he'd strived for. His accolades, innumerable. The hero I'd believed bona fide, instead of a hidden turpitude lurking in the shadow. All my flaws are his flaws. All my successes are his too. I try to remember the catalog with songs that don't burn the skin. Maneuver reminiscence that make me a good man, too. Hold him in a single, neat myth. A thread to tug or slack as needed. Drawing Fractals (Detroit, MI) fractal |ˈfraktəl|(noun) - a curve or geometric figure, each part of which has the same statistical character as the whole. Fractals are useful in modeling structures in which similar patterns recur at progressively smaller scales, and in describing partly random or chaotic phenomena such as crystal growth, fluid turbulence, and galaxy formation. - New Oxford American Dictionary “the pattern at the largest level can only be what it is at the smallest level. if we are chaotic within ourselves, our society will be chaotic. if we are fearful, gossiping, angry, dysfunctional, wounded at the small scale, then that is the society we will inhabit. this is a scientific impetus to transform ourselves to transform the world.” - Adrienne Maree Brown It is locomotive. Exhausting. It is mechanical and syncopated. It is early dawned. It is often freezing. It is smokestack. Constant. It is the joint pivot to fist. It is barbed fence and booming siren. It is Easter and Memorial Day. It is Dia de Muertos. It is alabanza. It is vinyl. Cracked tar. It is toothpick and gravel. It is ice cream truck. It is bustle. It is metal. It is salt mine. Gold mine. It is underground. It is malt liquor. It is fattoush and pacski. It is bottom bunk. Decorated. It is doorag. It is drag queen. It is dressed in paint. It is operatic. Drunk. It is borrowed time. Broken clock and sealed door. It is crabgrass. It is mustard and onion. It is graveyard. Bus terminals. Blunt wrapper. It is Clark Park. It is Rock-n-Rye. It is car window. Wind bustle. Fresco. It is bar fight. It is shoreline, headline, hairline. It is found in trunk. It is garden and bodega. Barrio and price out. It is red line. Red brick. It is pushing. Pushing. It is pillaged. It is arteries of pavement. Hollow point. It is train track. It is river walk and routine check. Hotter than July heat. It is bronze statue. Copper coin. It is Baptist church. Ghettoblaster. It is catfish and prison bid. It is cardboard slum. It is village overrun. It is leaky roof. It is basement jam. Marching band. It is toe tag. It is gas refinery. Always fire. It is on a porch drinking cognac. It is bruised fruit. Grass root. It is tired of being told what it isn't.$