Martha Silano
Santiago Says
he isn’t giving me laughing gas, he’s giving me local;
he’s got a needle but it’s not the needle, not the local
that’s calming me down; it’s the loco, the totally loco,
as in the last time my mother came to town, she took
one look at my brown furniture, shipped it all to Goodwill.
Swabbing my gums with cherry mint goop while his mom’s
letting loose, in his house, a piñata. It’s like Mardi Gras threw up
in my den, Santiago’s saying, my diseased mouth propped open
while he scrapes; but that’s nothing. My dad? He worked, you know,
in commercial wiring. So, this one time he goes touch that and I’m like
is it hot? And he’s all of course not, no, no, go ahead. So I touch it
and it knocks me out. Know what he says? Don’t trust nobody.
But you know my brother had to get me back for all that shocking-him-
with-the-car-battery-every-morning stuff. He’s an arsonist
investigator. Anyway, I’m like is that a tazer? Got me back all right.
Scars to prove it. I’ve never had a dentist scrape so hard, never knew
I had so much crud on my bones, so much periodontal hardship,
never knew I had, of all things, pockets, but one day my mom—
she works, you know, for Fish & Wildlife—comes home one day
to my dad in the backyard, dressing out a moose. In March. The only one
in the family with steady, upstanding employment, and her husband
in plain view with a poached animal. He’s yelling but he was stalking me!
and she’s after him with a lead pipe. And now Santiago’s waving
his cleaning tool like a little weapon, and now he’s shining me up,
shining the teeth I came into this world with, the ones I’ll be buried
or burned with, the ones that know all my dirty little grinding
and clenching secrets. But then Santiago’s back to his brother,
how he’s a Casanova; after his first divorce he revamped his apartment—
juke box, pool table, full bar in the living room, buncha black lights.
If he meets a woman who’d put up with that, maybe he’ll re-marry.
So he gets our aunts over there; next thing you know they’re in the bedroom.
Man, he’s saying, Aunt Suzie can really pole dance! And now it’s the final rinse,
and spit’s flying everywhere, saliva ejector ejected, and in this pastel office—
with these sober mini-blinds, this poor, puffy up-and-down chair—
and I’m choking on account of the little brother who believed for years
he was an orphan, left on the back porch, dressed like a little Eskimo.
Even took an interest in native cultures, cuz his big brother Santiago
Look! You’re not one of us! How could you be? We’re fifteen months apart!
On account of Santiago’s you oughta be glad we got these needles,
cuz instead of laughing? You’d be leaving teeth marks on a bullet.
"Santiago Says" originally published in Puerto del Sol and appears in The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception (Saturnalia Books 2011).
Bio
Martha Silano's books are What the Truth Tastes Like, Blue Positive, and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, chosen by Campbell McGrath as the winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Her work is also available online at The Kenyon Review Online, The American Poetry Review, Drunken Boat, and The Writer's Almanac. She teaches at Bellevue College.