From the Portugese

    Across the great breasts of the desert the horses gallop.
    Where are they going?
    They go to worship at Delphi - the sun comes round.
    The nervous horses make no sacrifice along the crying river.
    Following their teeth and strongly embracing a death that returns from
    water,
    Outside, leaving messages they come like exploring
    desperados,
    Triggered, they run between the population, the abandoned chief's
    breasts.
    The last horses release the river between the envies.
    And beat the lasting earth with relentless cadences.
    Look - the rest of one ancient race of man's companion.
    Then the villains substitute the horses' breasts with machines.
    It is lost again - the abysmal history.
    The impatient horses running to the river, to the curve of the horizon
    Desperately claiming no man.


    Her Entrance

    Little Olivia Rose seven hours old
    has her eyes shut to the flash of the camera.

    The strain of fighting her way out to
    this world shows on her face. Under hospital

    lights her skin is tawny like that of the
    onion placed on my mother's kitchen table

    next to the refrigerator upon which the
    magnet-fastened picture of Olivia Rose

    hangs. It is the sort of onion that is seldom found_
    symmetrical, spherical_that are

    photographed, too, for cookbooks, supermarket
    fliers. It bears no black spots or bruises,

    isn't oblong or lopsided. Olivia
    has been lucky, too. Her head in the picture,

    which is the same size as the onion, lacks
    dents. Her entrance did not leave her soft

    skull coned or flattened in the back. She
    is a fortunate human being, one who will

    be genuinely cooed over early in life. Maybe
    she'll be disappointed in her teen years, but

    at least she'll have a good start. This onion
    and the Buddha-like countenance of Olivia

    Rose, small eyes shut gently, accepting of
    her fate being born human, seem destined to have been

    paired in my mother's kitchen. The onion's
    base is reminiscent of the place where Olivia's

    small head, weighing the same, meets her new,
    flexible spine. Its sturdiness warns of

    Olivia's fragility and the curled, burnished yellow
    stem atop, like raffia to the touch, mirrors the

    curl of her pixie hair. The onion asks me to draw it
    eyes, mouth, nose, to fasten it to infant's clothes filled

    with lettuce leaves and dried grass, to swaddle it
    on the counter. But I deny it, and in an act of

    violence beneath Olivia's framed face, I cleave it
    in half with a knife too dull that takes too long and

    it's like divulging the best kept secret of a
    friend. The onion lies halved and dead still wearing

    its skin, stinging my eyes with accusation and I
    realize that I betrayed this bulb on the

    Saturday between Good Friday and Easter
    Sunday. But I don't have Judas' desperate will

    to return the thirty pieces of silver and retreat to
    the basement to hang myself. I will put it

    in the Easter pie mixed with egg, cheese,
    and pepperoni _the poor man's quiche that

    repels children. It is a far cry from Olivia's
    menu of breast milk and later, mashed

    bananas. Nothing here _not the onion _bears the scent
    of bringing up baby. If anything, it smells of frightening

    infant illnesses stealing away parents' sanities and
    sleep. To bite the onion is the fact that Olivia Rose is not mine.

    I cry with its free sweetness as the juice releases
    between my teeth only to be followed by the

    bitter acidity of envy. The evidence remains
    on my palate. If Olivia were mine, I'd keep the

    onion whole, dress it in finery to be Cinderella's
    coach or the Wizard's crystal ball. Instead,

    here it lies divided, its heart split and
    empty like my mother's arms awaiting

    a first grandchild.




    Bio Note
      Christine Luberto is currently an MFA candidate in the creative writing program at the New School. In 1997 Christine was awarded the Fourteenth Annual Wildwood Prize in Poetry.

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     Christine

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