Always Danger

DISAPPEARER
I know a girl thirteen and lean
as a sunflower stalk, all blunt
angles and bones, a girl who
never removes her necklace,
a black string of shark teeth.
To school and home, to shower
and sleep-always the comfort
of those incisors resting against
collarbone. Between classes
she slips her narrow body
through crammed hallways,
around jutting backpacks, elbows.
Home, whatever's spooned
onto her plate she nibbles with
her small teeth, her larger pair
dangling above the untouched
potatoes. Only one finger's
needed to empty her stomach,
one to flush before she showers,
water lacquering her skin, water
climbing down the twelve rungs
of ribcage. Off to sleep, barely
a mound under the covers,
barely the rise and fall of breathing
as her necklace etches her flesh,
checkmarks over her heart.
THE TAXICAB INCIDENT
A boy runs into a busy street,
a boy who happens to be my father.
Yes he's careless and yes here comes
the taxicab. This happened
in Bogotá, Colombia. And this:
a boy falls, a boy who happens
to be my father, fallen before
the taxicab. You know what
happens next: my existence
spoils the drama. How the taxicab
glides over my father and skims
his shoulder blades. He stands
unscathed and brushes the dust off
his clothes and continues to breathe.
Fallen differently, I'm not here.
Fallen the way he did, I am.
When the boy who happens to be
my father runs into a busy street,
I'm in the backseat of that taxicab
with my brother and sister.
The three of us, we're outlined.
Our skin is translucent as cellophane.
When we begin to scream
nothing but nothing leaps
from the zeros of our mouths.
Such is how the future lives
without influencing the world.
And my mother? She's the girl
hundreds of miles south, blowing
air into a plastic ring skinned
with water and soap. The flimsy
bubbles lift. Whether they are
pushed into a wall, the spikes
of branches, or the sky's blue field,
it is up to the wind.
ALWAYS DANGER
There's always the pit bull
lunging for someone's throat.
There's always the girl sucked
into the shadow of a van
and dumped in a field or the vast
blue of the ocean. And the car
crumpled like foil on the freeway,
the yellow sheet, the vigil
of flares. There's always that.
There's always the plunging bombs,
those wingless birds, silver-beaked,
whistling their death songs.
There's always the bullied kid
with revenge in his backpack.
Always. And there's always
the Christmas tree in flames,
its ornaments softening
like sherbet, in a house with bodies
dreaming under bedcovers.
A cop to chalk circles around
bullet casings. The black widow
and a baby's pudgy arm. The fallen
dominoes of a derailed train.
There's always an epidemic
congealing in the air. There's
always the busy café and someone
in a trench coat with his finger
on the switch. There's always
the man with a 3-inch nail
driven through his skull plate
who says he didn't feel a thing.
BULLET
We see the shadow of a bumblebee.
Fat dot skating the basketball court
where it's skins versus shirts. Benched,
a girl flirts with a boy diamonded
with sweat at the three-point line.
The orange ball's pitched his way,
fingers spread as if pushing a glass door.
Around the girl we see the blue air
blushes when she smiles. Shadow
of the basketball slides to the shadow
of the boy, charcoaling the court.
Curbside, a lustrous car rolls,
a tinted window whines down.
The sky around the girl vibrates red.
The boy shoots and we see the shadow
of the ball on the pavement gliding
toward the circle of the hoop.
We see the revolver but not what zips
out of its barrel, not the broken dash
of its shadow. Another black stitch
pulled from the world's seams.
EPISODE
His head jackknifed is the best way to put it.
She sliced the teakettle's throat when it screeched
on the burner. After the water was poured, the air
above the teacup filled with ghost shavings.
His head swayed on the ceiling like a birthday balloon.
Outside, a windblown potted plant sliced
the air with long green knives. You could see
the moon was quickly becoming a ghost.
The moon with its head inside the night's guillotine.
A lemon slice to squeeze into the tea. He blew
steam into the air before taking a sip.
A ghost-cloud pressed its face against the window
as his head slowly descended back into his collar.
With the bedroom light sliced off, the dark arrived-
a black crayon scribbling over air. His face
was ghostlike. There, where the crayon stopped filling.

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
One
Damage
The Soldier Inside the Horse
Disappearer
Customer Lounge
Alzheimer's
The Grandfather
The Taxicab Incident
According to One Statistic
The Goldfish
Another Dimension
Always Danger
Two
Composition in Red
Composition in Black
Razors
The Whirling Funnel
So the Pilot Says Over the Intercom
Bully
Humiliating the Tyrants
At the Courthouse
Jury Duty
Bullet
Chess Match Ends in Fight
Three
Early Lesson
Vons Parking Lot, Late October
Ghost Brother
Driving Toward the Sun
A Story to Tell
The Quiet Minutes
The Dinner Party
Night
The Gondolier
How to Commit Adultery
Leaving the Nurse
Four
Portrait of My Father Slapping His Ear
What a Little Charisma Can Do
Man on an Island
Topiary
The Sad Punk
Balcony Talk with Cigars
Aim
Dumbest
Donut Shop
The Eyes
Five
Fontanelle
Episode
Subzero
The Circus Octopus
Splitmind
Appointment
Self-Portrait with Back Turned
A Brief History of Antidepressants

“Always Danger blends a sense of menace, of ever-present harm, with almost painterly devotion to the images central to these poems. As good books often are, this is a book of obsessions: Everyone here is hurt or maimed, has lost or is losing. We’re presented with a world few would choose to live in, though many inhabit, without choice. To the extent that Hernandez is interested in offering redemption, it comes almost solely from the poet’s attention to and veneration of detail, from an imagination blessed with animate language. Hernandez’s achievement is the double witnessing of violence and beauty, the one unavoidable and the other, by the end, earned.”—Bob Hicok, award-winning author of Animal Soul, The Legend of Light, and Insomnia Diary “Fierce and swift and crisp, David Hernandez’s poems drill their way into the real and always find something alive and surprising there. There’s plenty of cleverness here, but what is special about these poems is an unusual quality of determination. Hernandez’s imagination goes at the world in attack-mode—not to show off, but to discover its human depths.”—Tony Hoagland, author of What Narcissism Means to Me: Poems“These poems—as urgent, fragile, wily as they are—go beyond the merely personal into the great world. Hernandez’s patient, generous eye is on family and stranger, the wounded and the lost, the rich life of the city, its parking lots and freeways, sad yards and heavy metal. Finally, a poet who is not the center of his universe! And it’s never simple, the dark joy that comes of such fierce attention.”—Marianne Boruch, author of five collections of poetry, including Poems: New and Selected and two books of essays on poetry, most recently, In the Blue Pharmacy