Lena hadn’t thought about manatees in several years, but that did not stop her from dreaming about them that night in July.
The merganser is the kind of crested duck that will rip your heart out of your living body, and then phone your mother and let her know, in no uncertain terms, what she has done and why.
The anopheles mosquito begged and salaamed, moving its impossibly thin legs up behind its proboscis, thinking: I’ve got to get a better job there is no future in this.
Centipedes on the walls in the bug house softly phosphoresced, while Lena swayed outside in the moonlight, singing a song about changing the light bulbs to lull them into uneasy dreams.
Manatees blew bubbles in Lena’s ears and rubbed their rough rubbery lips on the side of her head rumbling deep vibrations from the very heart of their existence.
The merganser flew over the swamp calculating maximum carnage as she released the explosive device from her webbed claws.
“Goodnight, my beauties,” whispered Lena as she drifted into a dream about mosquitos and beer. She knew they would brew up something special for her soon.
This is how our cheap food is paid for. And yet we can look at our early spring California produce without a feeling of complicity.

Y los muchachos cling
to the cantina’s jukebox heart, sing:
we never go nowhere we never see nothing
but work: these fingers bleed every daylong day,
aching from la joda of the harvest–
y la muerte, esa puta que les chifla
from the bus station balcony, from I-10,
from Imperial Ave. truck lot behind the power station,
from waterbreak delirium, from short-hoe
genuflections down pistolbarrel fields–
and the canals, green,
pumping life into those chiles, los tomates, once
a year some poor pendejo can’t take the grease-
heat drudge, the life of a burro, the lonesome nights
of sweat and harsh sheets and drinks
tattered lips pulling tequila
till el vato’s so alucinado he thinks
he can run free, thinks
the trucks with spotlights are motherships, thinks
he sees Villa shooting cars off I-25, hears Tlaloc, god
of storms, calling: water to water,
rain to rain, mud to mud—feed me…
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