Swinging Maria

After throwing up behind a pole in the Galeana square,
I call home. Ten pesos—one penny—per minute
at the farmicia's pay phone. I sit in the glass booth,
its doors folded around a wood bench,
and dial. My mother cries when she hears my voice.

I think it is Sunday, and picture her
on the sofa reading the morning paper.
You're too far away, she says. It's too dangerous.
I do not tell her that fever has burned
through my body for days.

That evening at the orphanage, Maria,
cuatro años, gnaws a blister on her finger
till it bursts and she cries.
I wrap a purple dinosaur Band-Aid around it
and Maria is mine for the night.

Don't get attached, we've been advised,
for this government won't allow its children
to leave. So I try not to think of Maria's mother
in prison for killing her father with a knife.
Or the rows of girls in dormitory cots,
their brown arms wrapped around pillows.

Swing, she says to me in English, so we walk
to the trees where plastic seats dangle on ropes.
I push and push, over the boys wringing
clothes by the creek, beyond the scorched cow field.
If I stop, she cries, Swing! so we swing on.

from Los Hijos (Longleaf Press, 2002) ©2002
©2002, first published in The Southern Review, Autumn 2001