Roberto Efren Osorio

Cleaning Grapes

Before sunrise, the valley holds its breath. Cars light up Elmo Highway like stars.
Squads of bandana-masked workers slip into the grape fields, now pregnant with black
fruit. In our squad, there are Angie, Mary, and Conchita. Each untangles her truths from
the vines—a lost son, a lost mother, a lost patria. These are things they never say face-
to-face but whisper always across the vine, over the sharp music of snipping grapes.
The sun is white and loud now. We are singing and laughing to Juan Gabriel. I tell them
he was gay. Mary says that it is wrong to be gay. I am scared to tell her that I am gay,
but, still, I do so. I clean the rot off a ripe bunch of grapes. At the end of the workday,
Mary cleans and packs grapes for me to take home to my family. These aren’t words, I
tell myself, but they are something to hold.

Boys in Bloom

Frida Kahlo brows, limp wrists,

hips for holding, and Wrangler Jeans.

We wear our bones the way our mothers do;

This is what makes us pretty.

Even when men lie us down

and carve our insides out like the pits of peaches,

we give thanks for what we are given

the way we were taught to.

How strange,

the way the ghosts we come from

come out of us

Arroyos lick our homeland’s rocky crater 

where swells of ocotillo

and palo verde stitch into the bend.

We, too, are written here.

Before the pillaging of lands and before hiding,

our bellies were full of milk and sun. 

We were naked. I don’t mean our bodies

crushed between men’s thighs in a church backstreet.

I mean we were alive.

Alive are the fireflies, harbingers of the dark.

Alive is the hummingbird,

dancing around the wild things out to eat him.

Alive are the wildflowers—twisting, pretty.