In the cold desert night, you sent crows
to pin me with their stares, vultures
to sip at my liver, its precious proteins.
I am one trumpet call from the grave
thinking heaven might be a soda fountain
chocolate malts and my hands slipping down
an angel's feathery wings.

It was then the sun rose and I was on a mirage
highway. My cousins whose names
I'd long since given up remembering
were hanging onto the bottom of a train,
every word from their lips blaming me
for becoming a gringo, a forbidden metamorphosis.

I had long envied the life cycle of a butterfly
gluttony rewarded with painted wings
and the jazzy sounds of brass
theme music to carry me to the fields
when I am again a Chicano pulling watermelons.

In my nightmarish dreams, I am no longer a doctor,
my patients having died from the cheap cigars
I had put out on their sutures, the little miracles
I had stitched into their skin.

Awake, I am traversing a blizzard,
but the snow is all black, smelling
of poppies. This is the opium den
where I became a man, where the moon
slipped down my throat and I had visions
of being chased by my father, his anger
at me leaving mother to her needles
and turnicate fluorescing until it became palpable,
manifest as the hoe he taught me to wield
when I was young and he said labor
was all I'd ever be, all I'd ever know.

Jeff Calhoun's writing credits include Blood Orange Review, elimae, Softblow, Poetry Midwest, Stirring, and Triplopia. He was recently nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart honors. When he's not mining the human genome for patterns or found poems, he's probably dreaming about banana pancakes or chocolate milkshakes."