stitching
FRAGMENTS of people, neighborhoods split by silent slices of your knife, our stitches barely tugging the healing skin together, Pancho’s dad clumsily sewing bloody bodies back into one, intertwining mangled skin with mingled skin. The body is a map in any language, in the Spanish that rises from the noontime radio telenovelas or the English barking from the blue news reporting another mangled body found smashed into the gutter, flattened against reality. Muscles and joints exposed, our skin ripping down the seams, peeling like layers of melting tar on the grooved rubber of cheap Hyundai tires, Koreatown noodle bowls steaming like the freeway oasis simmering from the 101, at 3pm, traffic hardly grunting, rising heat from the melting pot, the black tar tires, the noodle needles of fragmented people stitching themselves into the asphalt grid of Los Angeles.