Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless like water.
Now, you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup.
Now, water can flow or it can crash.
Be water.
—Bruce Lee
1.
When the lineup of prisoners first filed into the visiting room,
I picked out Dad by the beard, patchy like the El Cariso baseball fields
in San Fernando. The last time I saw him was ten years before
on the night he was betrayed by undercover cops posing as junkies;
they caught him in a rundown right as he was planning to steal himself home.
“Wow, mijo, you look so big,” he said after he hugged me
for a prolonged period of time. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”
2.
I could still remember the undercover officers that sat in the living room
with my siblings and me as the lead investigator debriefed Mom
in one of the bedrooms. “So, how old are you?” one of the cops asked,
the one that reminded me of Dodgers’ first baseman, Eric Karros.
“Twelve,” I said after I realized my brother and sister weren’t going
to interrupt their carpet-gazing. “Hmmm,” he said and crossed his arms,
partially embracing his belly. He didn’t seem interested in questioning me
any further given Dad’s already full count: 3 kids, 2 strikes on his record,
and no outs this time around.
3.
The narcs gave Mom a Ziploc bag large enough to fit everything
Dad had been wearing that night: his clothes, brown leather shoes,
and latex gloves. Though they chafed my inner thighs,
I wore his boxers to school the following week and for months thereafter:
white, cratered with moth holes, patterned with the New York Mets’ mascot, Mr. Met.
4.
I felt a phantom itch near my knees as Dad and I took a seat
at a chair and table bolted to the ground, ensuring the inmates’ safety
in the event of a bench-clearing brawl. “Remember when we used to watch
kung fu movies?” he said. “I was thinking about that time you kicked
a tostada out of your brother’s hand.” He smirked. “Yeah, that was pretty badass.”
I smiled at the memory. The blow had been so swift and well-placed
that the petrified tortilla flew across the kitchen, out of my brother’s hand—
who continued to hold the outline of a disc for seconds afterward—
landing intact in an ajar drawer. “You remember what he used to say?” Dad said.
“Who? My brother?” I said. “No, Bruce Lee. In that scene where he smacks
his student for focusing on his finger and not at what the finger
was pointing to: the moon.”
5.
When the officers left, Mom stayed in her room for what felt like months.
When she came out, her lips were pursed with her fists at her waist
just as Jesus when he was tasked to not let the cup pass from Him, or Lee,
to fight his way up a five-story pagoda filled with martial arts masters,
or the Mets, to clad themselves with blue and orange. She understood
that she’d have to be our leadoff man and clean-up hitter, our coach and umpire.
She sat down beside us and told us Dad wouldn’t be around for at least 12 years—
a crooked number for a crooked man. That night, I dreamt Dad and I
were spirits swimming in a river of colostrum inside of Mom’s body,
one that satiated our sins, but not our thirst to remember.
6.
One of the inmates was celebrating his birthday, so they gave us all
a slice of cake and coffee with 2% milk. After taking the cup,
Dad gave thanks and said, “You know, I’m glad you took after me,
in looks, I mean. Your Mom’s brothers are all short.” And as he separated
the frosting from the sponge, the distinction I had made between his role
as a parent and that of my buddy became as insignificant as the distance
between Brooklyn and Queens. “Well,” Dad said, pausing to lick
the brown frosting from the plate, “she did breastfeed you as a baby,
so I guess that helped.”
7.
Dad’s ejection from our home marked the end of a losing season,
one filled with name-calling and bad calls, slides and bruises
from the battery he’d formed with Mom. Before she got up from the couch,
she reached for my hand. I felt a shock as our fingers made contact—
currents of her blood and his short-circuiting my veins—
and I suddenly felt it would’ve been better for me to have dissolved
into her amniotic fluid, if I hadn’t been born.
8.
I left the prison as I once had Dodger Stadium after a 12-inning playoff loss,
trying to rid myself of something that was drowning me from within.
I remember walking into a sea of people flooding every stairwell,
pathway, and sidewalk, where I no longer felt like a person, but a drop.
I stopped crashing into people trying to find an exit and allowed myself
to be borne by the flow. I wanted to be nothing, to be water.
Jose Oseguera is an LA-based writer of poetry, short fiction and literary nonfiction. His writing has been featured in Emrys Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, Potomac Review and The Literarian. He was named one of the Sixty Four Best Poets of 2019 by the Black Mountain Press. His work has also won the Nancy Dew Taylor Award, placed 2nd in the 2020 Hal Prize Contest and been nominated for the Best of the Net award (2018, twice in 2019) as well as the Pushcart (2018, 2019 and 2020) and Forward (2020) Prizes. He is the author of the poetry collection The Milk of Your Blood (available through Kelsay Books and Amazon).