Estrellita

Through the factory glass I watch
the second shift arrive. Mothers and daughters
cross a muddy stream, arm in arm, confiding
like schoolgirls. Behind the building
the smell of hot cement and menthol 100s.
From the chaparral comes the sizzle of cigar stubs
with capsule eyes: cicadas thrumming for rain
or conjugation until they’re brown shreds.

On cue everyone drops their smokes
and pushes through the steel door painted blue,
a color my uncle says will trick the devil
into thinking it’s the door to heaven.
A worker begins her weary blandishments
at the foot of the rapier loom, a lubricious
machine with a mind to grab her. Once
I saw a praying mantis catch a hummingbird.

Once I saw Ivanna leave work and she never
made it home. They blew up her face to poster size.
Underneath, where her name should have been –
Se Busca. There’s a pink cross with her head-shot
nailed to it, one in a vast thicket of crosses.
They look like roses unable to bloom.

From my front door it looks like brass insects
my neighbor’s child is plucking out of the dirt.
Estrellita skips across the yard jingling
her plastic bag of spent shells from a 45.
Constellations fizzle in the orange spray
of daybreak – sunrise over Juarez – a reminder
that every little star is in fact a raging hell.

Monstrous Birth (1870)

Some saw the birth as a portent
and wished to stand in its presence.
A line formed.

The stillborn infant’s face had a fierce aspect.
From the crown of its head to the chin
was a caul resembling a pale hood.

Word got around.
I don’t know which was worse;
How the baby seemed to stir

behind the muslin shroud
or how wind would part the clouds
and dark fields that looked barren

were suddenly scattered
with moonlit scarecrows—
Klansmen standing watch.

The Child Savers

-1990s ritual abuse moral panic

One morning two ladies came to my door,
came to question my son, prompted him
to remember how once a constable, his teacher
and a party magician took him from his classroom,
and sat him beside a corpse in an ice cream truck.
Could he recall that time the mayor’s wife drove him
to a Baptist encampment where a bad nurse
took his temperature, let candles drip on his stomach?
How a grandmother was hung by the neck,
then her eyes opened and played the organ.
Didn’t somebody’s father dress like Raggedy Ann?
Did a doctor dance naked with a cannibal clown?

Could he identify the school board members
who dismembered a dog, pricked his finger,
performed a ritual to replace his arm with the arm
bone of Satan? Would he recognize the TV news
anchor who took kids to the Y where a gorilla was bled
or the janitor who put staples in his tongue
and buried a girl on the playground?

The Child Savers took my son in loco parentis
to inspect his nervous physique, coaxed him
to call out the devil’s prefects, recreate scenes
of sadistic coprophilia on a doll with snap-on genitals.
They took my bright, happy son and brought back
a boy I’ve never met, one who looks as if his heart
is tearing out of him as he chokes up tales
of infanticide fed to him by a clutch of raging inquisitors
concealed in polyester and clip-on laminate faces.
The Furies reborn.

David Bart

David A. Bart (DavidABart.com) is a writer from Arlington, Texas. His poetry appears in I-70 Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Poet Lore, Slipstream, Sixfold, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Margie, Cider Press Review, San Pedro River Review, Illya's Honey , Red River Review, Pinyon Poetry, The January Review and three anthologies from Mutabilis Press.
He conducts creative writing workshops and teaches music on the elementary level.