Adrienne Gruber - Buoyancy Control

Fingers measure and pour the alcohol. The bottles smell like candy. Twice a week the shrill siren of a tortilla truck passes through El Llano. Dogs have flies around their mouths. Women in television commercials are whiter than you are. Learn to say caf con leche; this is what a womans skin looks like.

Think of a man once loved, planned a life with. Bike down a gravel switchback, launch head first over the handlebars. The bike on top, the sun, a frying pan branded to back. On Saturdays, the market in Montemorelos. Boiled corn mixed with salsa and crema fresca. Kids sell toy cars and Spiderman dolls, cowboy belt buckles.

Silver purses and pink lipsticks. A scruffy one-eared dog trots by, nipples dragging like udders. Whoever sucks her dry gets a mouthful of dust. Fifty-cent bottles of beer are sweeter than milk. A man lifts iron birdcages out of a truck, glint of green-tipped wingspalomas; their muffled throated coos. At the market, look for a mortar and pestle to grind chilies.

On New Years Eve in Monterrey, eat pale cow intestines in gunpowder broth. Shots are heard all evening; children set off firecrackers and twirl sparklers. The neighbours play mariachi until six a.m. A car alarm runs for hours before the battery gives out. Even in rain, no decisions are made. The dogs stay inside, except the ones at the baseball field, digging through wet leaves at the foot of the bleachers.

Leave a beer bottle on the pitchers mound, a bundle of roadside azaleas. Back at the house,
cookbooks exasperate. No recipe for meatloaf. The rain pounding on the roof is worse than the hail of pecans let loose by the night wind. The cold and its contagion. Water moves toward a bed of cement into a pool, the way mercury slides along kitchen tile, thermometer in shards.

Stick hands in the meat, raw and slippery. Lupita, next door, calls Adrianna and gives little cakes to take home. Enriques roosters claw the dirt. Always a cockroach beside the shoes, an exoskeleton. In the kitchen, a fire in a small dark corner. Hold hands over until they blister.

Outside the dogs carry oranges like softballs in their mouths. There isnt anything to do but pass the time. Dangle feet in the irrigation water. Bougainvillea, hibiscus, buttered sunflowers. Dogs follow to the river. One finds a turtle and bats it around.

I cant hold on to anything.