Busted Boy
A skinny, black teenage boy, around fifteen or sixteen years old get on the Number Six bus with the speaker. He sits across from him. The speaker didn't notice him all that much because there were a couple of older men that smelled like wine chatting to him. They were planning to travel to California in order to get some welfare checks and then return to Arizona to obtain food stamps.
As the speaker gets off the bus at the Transit Center, the young teenager gets off behind him, is pushed up against a pole by two burly men and is hand-cuffed to it. The speaker watched, along with an Indian man, but no on else seems to notice. The Indian man and the speaker look at one another and go on their separate ways. The speaker looks for the two wine-drinking men, and for plainclothes people, but he knows the latter are definitely around. This issue is a familiar one, of busted teens that are not white. As a new person in the area, he is still familiar with these issues.
Culture and the Universe
A scene from two nights ago is described, in which there is darkness, a half-moon and stars. There were men. The abstract concepts of prayer, faith, love and existence are mentioned. Ortiz wonders if people really understand culture and the reality of being human. He describes people as bringing painted sticks made of wood, together moving towards some stone. The universe asks us to lean into it.Together we have no words, and stop.
Ortiz leans on a wall which spins him to the stars and the heavens, silently and without words. He concludes that it isn't humankind or culture that limits us, but the sheer vastness that is left unexplored and the fact we don't allow the stars to own us.
Blind Curse
Ortiz ponders how one could be driving whilst blind for a specific two seconds and they'd last forever. He thinks about this while a truck passes by through a storm, not noticing the hill slipping away. He says he curses, although it does nothing. The words disappear, flying to an unspecified place. In the moment, the road does the same.
He tells the reader that we are there, a tiny struggling cell. We could be significant, but we could be meaningless. His curse goes, and his prayer follows.
