Cyan James

AT LEAST I HAVE A BROWN ARM

Boil me down and I’m three pale limbs, one brown. Say my left arm is marrón. 
Could throw una roca across the Rio Grande. That arm is from Baja California; 
the pale one trickled down from Texas sugar: burning fields, a town name
after great-uncles, and did you know cane ash floats palpable through the air? 
Tatters like miniature murciélagos caught in nose hairs along with a caramel
smell, with jet fuel humidity from the rocket launch pads and feathers blown
off birds migrating through gaps in the sections of La Pared that stand like ushers
around the velvet rope of La Frontera, which, before it was dammed, used to shift
like una serpiente; plantation mansions that once abutted cool rio agua now lord
over dry land farms, stubble that pricks feet, makes ojos suspicious, what’s that 
in the undergrowth, why all las banderas and blue barrels full of plastic water bottles,
why so many red dots on maps where DNA analysis pins mummies to la tierra
like dead windmills, it makes my brown arm want to reach out with jobs y mas agua 
while the other arm is with other white limbs, shopping for security as if it’s power suit
tailored well enough to cover every needle track—sparkling powder doesn’t stick to it; 
orders for cheap labor falls right out of its pockets; it leaves no trace, in otras palabras;
it’ll never fit a brown underdog because most white limbs hoist pom poms only for ghost
colored underdogs or maybe those uninterested in drinking pure river water or putting
ladders against the walls of Ivy colleges where they may learn how to comprar Armani
and arms in general and then turn bitterer than the most unprocessed brown azucar.

Cyan James's MFA is from the University of Michigan, where she was awarded three Hopwoods. Her work has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, and has been published or is forthcoming in Conjunctions, Shenandoah, Image, Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, The Account, and Salon, among others. Currently she is revising a novel about the women who survived the Green River Killer. She loves fiddles, falconry, long road trips, old front porches, and Laphroig.