Carmen by Gustavo Hernandez

The four walls of the Setco Plastics Factory
were built around my sister’s name—its red
lip, its pride, its dark hair pulled up to where
she couldn’t see it. Her words were sifted
through a wall of exhaust fans, lost
as the second shift pushed the city to the
edges of a new cycle. The light again
drained from Flower, from Grand, from First.

On most nights, she and I met
in the artificial glow of our television—
belts of stars soaked into the gold leg
scrolls of telenovela chairs. I was
kept awake by chaining meaning
to other manufactured sounds—fat
syllables of my name maneuvering through
the blades of lean foreign words.

There was one night in July, where a mute girl
in the novela willed the words back to her mouth
to tell Arturo Peniche that his fiancé
had been a terrible villain. I told you
she’d get her voice back. Carmen’s tone
was tempered flat through repetition. Bottles
and bottles and plastic cereal containers
evenly spaced on a conveyor belt.

She motioned for me to join her
at the open front door. From the street, she was
fading red lipstick; I was an electric blue
garage sale t-shirt. The moon played
with the overgrown ficus. June bugs spun
around a porch light, but we looked past them
and dreamt a far-off language.

Gustavo Hernandez is the author of the micro-chapbook Form His Arms (Ghost City Press). His full-length poetry collection, Flower Grand First, is forthcoming from Moon Tide Press in 2021. He was born in Jalisco, Mexico and lives in Southern California. Find more at: hernandezpoetry.com