Somnambulistic circus Ribera & Velazquez welcomes everyone to the show “Merry-Go-Round”, where shadows that escaped the Platonic cave turn the carousel in the foggy catacombs.
Producers: Ihor Dyurych, Liliya Mlynarych, Sergiy Nedzelskyy, Maxim Asadchiy
Director of Photography: Serhiy Mykhalchuk
Art Director: Svitlana Makarenko
Music: Oleksandr Shchetynsky
The Rycoffs have planted blood-red batface along the edge of the walk.
They will get all the hummingbirds and butterflies
Next year. Push play. Of course I have to mention how my mind
Does not want to mention
This entire night, underscored by Wilco’s lines
“I’d always thought that if I held you tightly /
You’d always love me like you did back then”
Omits, as Mayakovsky would call her, the target.
My son, Bay, and I, walk past Thing 1 and Thing 2.
How many ballerinas
Does one expect to see walking the streets this late at night?
Death is always on the prowl: the near miss of Rusty
By the Home Depot truck in New York City
Brings the near misses back today:
My idea of the soul is a dance party with palm trees
Wrapped in foil. Dancing is flying and the music
Always sounds like the first time you heard the Talking Heads
Combined with the second time you listened to Velvet Underground’s
Self-titled album all the way through.
My third eye takes naps. Nods off without warning.
Right now, I am asleep with two eyes open.
The hunchback of Notre Dame answers the door of the house
At the corner of Harbor Cove and River. The inmate, in his prison
Stripes, holds his one-year-old son, also in prison stripes.
The scantily clad prison guard swings her billy club.
Oh never to be stuck in commuter traffic again.
We all learn, eventually, “don’t read the comments.”
Minions have taken over the neighborhood.
A witch doused in gauze cackles
From her corner of the walkway; a skeleton sits on our bench
Doing its best impression of William Logan, right leg
Crossed over left, right arm stretched out to the right, skull
Tilted to 11, chin and right toe pointed to 4.
A bottle of hand sanitizer, almost empty, cranes its neck
Over the edge of the second edition unabridged Webster’s
New International Dictionary, 1958.
Paul Manafort walks by dressed up as a train engineer.
The Rycoff family, dressed as the knights of the round table,
Ring the doorbell of the largest house in the neighborhood.
The head of the HOA, a former porn star, shows up at the party
As a 2007 IRS tax audit of Jeff Sessions. A guy with a bonfire
Wheel in his driveway hands out Heinekens. Push stop.
The definition of a circle in a world without geometry
Sources its etymology from the fleeing prisoner, innocent
Despite all the charges, born in Candé, France, a short drive
From the Collège de Combrée where he learned
How to love an older woman. Where she and her sister
Took him after the school day was over, but time allowed.
“Never trust the living,” said Juno, played by Sylvia Sidney,
In Beetlejuice.
The line, a set of lines, intersecting Sumi lines, outline
The idea of the face of a ram, ink drops like mistakes, like eyes,
Like the image of planets in a solar system, like orbits,
Like the beginning moment that determines the weight of a line:
Samhain, the stray red balloon, the “somebody start something.”
I dressed as a wolfman, Bay, a wolfboy. We howl because we howl.
This is the root of how the moon turns us. The skeleton in the red shawl
Escorts us to the courtyard. There in the 18th card, an owl in the tree
Sees two wolves calling down the partial moon.
There in the distance the Sierras wait all winter.
A mastiff dressed in a tuxedo walks by, pauses.
[1992, Nevada County, California]
Grandma takes my beating heart in her warm hands and holds it until it softens, until it knows it is safe to open. She sings stories so it will remember things it has never felt. She lulls its redness with her touch. When the heart opens she pours in all her love and all her fears with it. She pours in all her dreaming and her bruises. She touches its tissues to her swollen lips and weeps. The muscle grows bigger with her tears. The muscle grows tender, skittish to the touch. She sets a kettle on the stove and stirs in possibility, measuring out worries in her palm before sprinkling them in. She ladles the brine into a bowl and serves it with oyster crackers. She spreads the heart with a butter knife on toast and tells me to eat, to help myself to more.
Since age five there has been one constant: transit. Joint custody, foreign exchange, weekly commutes, overseas living. I left the home I knew because there were no other options for a girl who picked up the scent of rotting bodies buried in the women around her, who saw despair seething out tiny pores and ragged cuticles, the bloodied carnage piled high from generations before her, around her, closing in. Wasted. All this utterly wasted human capacity and the lethal rage it breeds. The biting perfectionism of the frustrated woman. The broken women who break babies the way they break mustangs. At twelve, I signed a pact in blood with momma swearing I would not marry or have babies. It was a pact with myself to remain human. At the first chance: a high school exchange program in Colima, Mexico. Free, except for airfare. Only two students per semester in a school of three thousand. I applied. Anywhere. Anywhere but here. I saved money for the ticket from an afterschool job. I was sixteen. Because the violence of gendering was not taken seriously, I could not call myself a refugee. I could only say: Mexico, New Mexico, Arizona, Madrid, Sacramento, Chicago, New York, Brasília, Rio. I could only see my smiling white face in brochures and on billboards across Mexico advertising the international school I attended for free in the exchange. I could only say: I was privileged. I could only say: I was lucky enough to get away.
[August 2001, St. Louis University, Madrid campus]
I made it to college. I read Alice Walker’s recollection of three gifts her mother gave her when she left home and went off to study. I underline one gift – a sewing machine – and the rationale for it: that it was the one tool she could use to make anything she needed so she wouldn’t have to depend on anyone else. It stuck with me: the image of that sewing machine being part of feminist theory in an academia in which I felt so alien. I spent a day and a night in that basement apartment scrubbing the tile walls of their years layered in oil spatters, and in those hours, instead of the familiar shame, I felt proud of my mothers, my grandmothers. Of the practical skills they had gifted me. Of all they could give.
[September 2013, Rio de Janeiro]
I grew fascinated with language because language was the thing used to contain, to beat me into smaller pieces so that I would be easier for my family and my culture to masticate. They were busy. They didn’t have space for the room I needed. So, I studied the words, the syntaxes. I kept a spiral notebook where I composed rhyming poems, copied down strings of letters I didn’t understand and looked up their definitions. I made lists from a thesaurus of words to use in future rhyming poems. I turned to paper when punished for speaking. Dish soap and thumbs down my throat, the larynx closes. Be seen, not heard. Be accommodating and sweet. I was told terrible stories about myself, explanations for why I was so strange, so troublesome and mean. I became a bully who was bullied. I had no other way to say things. Bad words were off-limits but bad words turn toxic when kept inside a body. They eat away at the esophagus, erode the trachea. The difference between Brazilians and United Statesians, between those raised male and those raised female, it seems, has something to do with the way words are held and released.
It is strange to use text in this quilt, to employ written language in a tradition developed largely by silenced ones: the slave, the wife, the woman. But this is my reality now: writing, the privilege of my education. This is my contribution to the tradition, then. An expansion, not a breaking.
Bringing quilting into writing, integrating it: the only way this work is real. For it to exist only as Roman script on white paper would be a false making. Forced sterilization.
On paper, I cannot move my pen in a straight line. I have tried and it is terrible. Some would say good, but that’s not true. Things move sidewards. Lines round, contain too many hyphens, rests, commas, internal rhymes, refrains.
I give my head to clear thinking
My heart to greater loyalty
My hands to larger service
For my club, my community, my country, and my world.
– 4-H Pledge
[2003, California State University, Sacramento]
I design a Special Major in Chicano/Latino Literature & Art. It is not the novelty of an assumed cultural “other” that I find engaging, but the histories and articulations of rural, working class and Far West experience otherwise absent in academia. I resist the narrative that culture only travels East to West, North to South because I have seen it move in all directions. I know Indigenous America and Africa have had extensive influence on U.S. and European cultures. I know that Country & Western ballads are just boleros sung sideways and that cowboys are adaptations of Mexican vaqueros. I rebel against the cultural hegemony of an English Major. I study the ancient civilizations of this land, the Silk Road and the Islamic Empire, how Africa made its way through Portugal and Spain and into the so-called New World in ways our national narrative does not allow. I study how plants native to the Americas became the base for contemporary Italian cuisine because Italians were the only Europeans willing to experiment with fruits and vegetables new to them. I study the undocumented intermixing of our One Drop heritage, and the ways languages change and adapt just as readily as culture even in spite of institutionalized racism. It is through the language of Chicanismo that the Eurasian aunt who raised me and I can speak about our family: my Dust Bowl kin who call themselves White who were once High Germans who shame Low Germans who lie about Gypsies who marry poor Mexicans who marry poor Swedes who marry poor French Canadians who lie about any kind of Indian who marry poor Nicaraguans who marry poor Blacks who marry poor Blackfeet who marry elite Japanese who marry wealthy Englishmen who marry whomever the fuck they please. It is in the overlaps and blending, in the mestizaje I feel most at home.
[2012, Rio de Janeiro]
I cross the street to the pharmacy. The military police are outside yielding assault rifles, occupying the entrance to the favela down a side street. Rio has just secured its bid for the 2016 Olympics. I notice my visceral response to assault rifles on men in uniform is different from other passers by. I notice myself as foreign in this instance, as gringa hailing from the radical left and libertarian hills of Northern California: my response is terror, then rage. Milling around me are faces that convey we are used to this. This is normal. I mask my reaction. I enter the pharmacy, buy toilet paper, toothpaste. Commerce drones on down the boulevard: un suco de abacaxi e um pão de queijo, por favor.
[2013, Rio de Janeiro]
Apathy in a year’s time has turned to outrage, action, political mobilization. Protests one million strong all across the country finding solidarity in a global network of anonymous sites, authors. There is deep fear in the daily proof that life here is not valued. But there has been enough. Basta já! There are reverberations of Brazil’s past revolutions, of the Arab Spring, of Occupy. There is no face, only moving.
[2013, São Paulo]
We set up our table at Feira Plana, the largest artist publications fair in the country. Makers are enflamed. The medium itself again becomes an active one, full of nuance and risk. R staffs our table while I hop from press to press examining new work, swapping samples and talking shop. I return to staff our table while she tours the fair. We have become part of a traveling band of independent publishers in a place where independent publishing was long illegal. Until the mid-1800s, printing in the colonies was forbade; all published materials had to be printed in Britain and then imported from the Portuguese crown. Brazil was the last country in the Americas to acquire a printing press (Mexico was the first), let alone to legalize publishing in the colony. This is part of the reason we have found it hard to buy paper or print books locally: there is no strong tradition of papermaking or printing, and, by extension, a limited number of well-trained printers. There are letterpress printers from the Cordel tradition, but not much by way of commercial printing. Our small press had to limit a recent edition to 750 copies because that was the maximum quantity of a particular paper to be found in all the country. The past is present is not philosophy, but economics. Today at Casa do Povo, we are part of a blend of small presses, fine art presses, self-publishers, poster makers, book artists, artist-instructors, cartoonists, zine makers and poets. Many print with the aid of salvaged technologies that allow hands to smudge ink: letterpress, silkscreen, risograph, Xerox. The immediacy and resilience of our mediums are especially resonant now. Again.
You repair the thing until you remake it completely.
Louise Bourgeois
It is the compulsion of the Western fine art tradition to break from that very tradition. We call this Innovation and True Art and deny that it came from anything but Pure Genius. We are often blind to the continuity, even the continuity of the impulse to make it new.
It was not until age thirty that I could write in first person plural. It was not until age thirty that I felt entitled enough to write using the word “we,” to claim myself as part of a larger cultural conversation.
I resist the act of writing to be fully present in my body – stitching, making, moving. This need makes the shaming come alive: you are lazy, too feminine, too poor to be smart, too rural. A bumpkin. But if I keep moving, if I stay in this wordless making, I soak in its power on its own terms. I am released from the peculiar colonization of the written word upon my flesh.
[April 2014, California]
I begin sewing a welcoming quilt for my new nephew from scraps of worn-in clothing from each member of his family. Sometimes we must make a thing only for our love of the person receiving it. I am pulled to make him something to touch, something to hold over his little boy body when it feels fragile or alone or battered by this world, something to remind him he is loved. Something to protect him from the particular brutality this world holds for his little boy body.
The making of his quilt takes months away from my studio practice, places me in the bedroom with a fold-up table, sewing machine, chair. I love this making. It returns me. But, I cannot help but feel plagued by the notion that turning my making toward a loved one minimizes my work, places me back in the world of country crafts and women’s work –quilts, scrapbooks, embroidery. I have swallowed the myth of male genius, too, despite my body’s attempts to reject it. It poisons my love of other ways of making, insisting that I am less of an artist when I care for those around me, when I hold the capacity to hold them close and give.
I refuse this. I see all around me a world of makers, many of them women, equally adept at committing to their own making and at elevating those around them. I slash open a vein to drain the poison. I suck out the altered blood and spit mouthfuls on the ground. I cauterize the breakage, begin interviewing makers who also make space for others. I make plans to publish a series of these interviews, then a book.
In their most active years, members of the Royal Chicano Air Force —originally called the Rebel Chicano Art Front— did not distinguish between those who secured the grants, organized the events, repaired the engines, and those who made the artwork. This act of denying divisions was a conscious subversion of Eurocentric frameworks of art and life and culture. Or, as Dr. Ella Maria Diaz writes, “An important component of the RCAF’s creation of a Chicano/a mural environment was their collapse of artistic hierarchy in opposition to the idea of beauty and artistic genius as the realm of the individual artist.” In the tellings and retellings of their story in the popular press, however, this ideology is downplayed and the more conventional story of the RCAF as a core group of visual artists becomes History.
How does one convey a different narrative to a reader unwilling or unable to read any other way than the one they already know? The widespread exclusion of historically marginalized voices from prominent venues of culture is attributed to this unwillingness to think beyond convention.
People who have survived atrocities … witnesses as well as victims are subject to the dialectic of trauma. It is difficult for an observer to remain clearheaded and calm, to see more than a few fragments of the picture at one time, to retain all the pieces and to fit them together. It is even more difficult to find a language that conveys fully and persuasively what one has seen.
Judith Herman, M.D., Trauma and Recovery
Everywhere I carry my North American body – Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Greece, Japan as reconstructed inside the Sacramento home of my WWII-surviving great-aunt – there is a physical layer I must shed in order to be in that place. I am made acutely aware of a covering I carry in the place I most often call home, a shield crafted against the daily violence of life there. It is a different kind of shield than the one I carry in Rio on my way to work where the violence is honest – armed robberies, murders, looting. There are other kinds of violence, too: class warfare, threats of another military coup, hate crimes, rape. And yet my body remains open in particular ways as I walk the street aware of very real danger. I am guarded, yes. I am hyper-vigilant all the time. Watchful. Weary. It is exhausting. The artist Alma Leiva crystallizes this feeling in her installation-photograph series Celdas (Prison Cells), in which she recreates the interiors of homes in San Pedro Sula, the second largest city in Honduras and a narco-city now infamous for being the most violent in the world. Leiva brings outside elements such as playground sand and teeter-totters inside, giving the intimacy of home space the weight of the prison cell it becomes in a city where the danger outside seeps into everything. In her essay, “The Other Side of Fear: Alma Leiva’s Prison Cells,” Dr. Tatiana Reinoza writes, “Home spaces are records of embodied and situated knowledge that allow viewers to connect the private with the collective sphere of experience.” Reinoza goes on to cite the work of Amalia Mesa-Bains, María Brito and several artists in diaspora whose work focuses on intimate space as sites of violence and memory. These troubled intimacies are more common than we care to admit.
We drink excessively in Rio. Drinking allows dance and laughter, but the weight of history and its consequences is left unaccounted for, untended. The body doesn’t close, but it craves numbing, a safety. We spend our days off from work indoors, attempting to unravel. When I am designing Leiva’s exhibition catalog years later, the sight of her photographs causes blood to rush to the surface of my skin. The feeling that radiates from the pixels haunts, finally distilled.
In the United States, it is the body that closes. It shuts in on itself to ward off the myriad micro-assaults to the senses: separation, subdivision, the aggressive insistence of a thing called personal space, the sound of English in the way we speak it, the threat of white male terrorism that knows no consequence: mass murder, serial rape, shootings by police. My skin braces for the chill of contact: the handshake, the monotone speech that inquires about what I do for a living, the askance looks at any slip into vulnerability, desire, feeling. There is little space to be human here unless I am alone. And while solitude can be cause for elation, the prolonged isolation of one human from others causes the heart to stop. It incites death by a slow, steady calcification layered upon the flesh. This subtle closing is not the same as one that threatens immediate survival, of course, but it threatens survival all the same. The body only breaks more slowly.
And what happens when intimate space itself is a warzone? Where does the body break then?
In empire, violence becomes a proud part of family narrative. We are sons and daughters and grandchildren of heroes who fight in wars to protect our freedom. We absorb the trauma of the soldier. We treat their pain as elevated, as honorable and just. And yet our domestic homicide toll accounts for more of our own deaths than all the soldiers in all the wars we’ve fought, but we do not honor these sacrifices or their repercussions. Violence becomes a comfort when tied to home life, like the scent of vanilla or a wood-burning stove.
[1992, Nevada County, California]
Grandma dresses me in a button-down shirt, pressed with starch, dried by the fireside. She talks me through the binding of a tie, pointed at the end like my father’s, knotted perfect. Don’t you never kiss no man’s foot.
Homage to Mistress Oppenheimer by Steve Kronen
Eyewear Publishing, 2018
60 pages, paperback, $14.99
Steve Kronen is a master of what we might call the “high” art of poetry, by which I mean a poetry in which the craft is deep and various and the knowledge of poetic and cultural traditions informs—and even determines—the poet’s formal choices, intellectual range, and emotional responses to his chosen subject matter. In his most recent book, Homage to Mistress Oppenheimer, Kronen’s embrace of traditional forms is both assured and innovative. In the best of these poems, the poet’s wide-ranging, multi-faceted references to intellectual, cultural and scientific traditions feel embedded organically in the language, part of the very sinew of the verse.
The poems embrace a mind-boggling cast of characters from high and popular culture and ideas ranging across the Western canon, to say nothing of a host of well-known and not-so-well-known poets. In a less assured writer, in fact, such constant formal and intellectual pyrotechnics might seem mere affectation, a pretentious and show-off-y affirmation of the poet’s knowledge of the Western canon, a kind of acrobatics of the soul. In Kronen’s best poems, though, such acrobatics seem part of the poet’s blood and marrow, embedded in his heart and central nervous system. In these stronger poems, in fact, the present world and the world that lies behind and before it, are braided in fresh, original ways. This is a strong book, unfashionable in its artistic gusto and challenging in intellectual range, one that apprentice poets as well as long-term practitioners can learn from and enjoy.
One of the pleasures of deftly crafted, intricate poems such as Kronen’s, poems in which challenging formal structures are actively determinative of content, lies in the fact that they reveal themselves fully only after successive readings. Take for example the first two stanzas of a sestina-in-rhyme, “How I Became King”:
Rumors from the capital: the caliph lowered
his fork of larks’ tongues in dreamy hollandaise
and ordered all of black-draped Constantinople
to turn its mournful eye to the Emperor-
to-be, a pleasant tow-haired boy, his snuff-
sniffing father, Stefan the Garrulous,
dredged from the carp-pond, leaving us ruleless
at last, our village decking its huts with flowered
wreaths and dancing the long-repressed Balinksnov—
Yanka Hoy! Yanka Ruiz!—three days
and nights, slitting the goat to make for purer
days ahead while I, a baby at nipple…
Even in this short excerpt, Kronen’s wide embrace is emphatic and impressive. The pleasure in the play of language is manifest. It is also obvious that the poem won’t be captured on a single reading. Rather, one must sit with it a while. In the case of this poem, real rewards follow.
In some others, though, in which the play is not so exuberant and the language not quite so scintillating, the poems—which in fact require explanatory notes to be fully grasped—one comes away merely befuddled. Even these less-successful poems, though, resist obscurity and work as poems—that is, as made things—as Kronen’s language is always clear and well-wrought. Kronen aspires not toward Ashbery or Carson; his contemporary masters are the likes of Justice and Wilbur.
In a few of the poems here, Kronen seems to relax, to allow a memory or an experience seem to speak for itself in a freer, less formally-determined language. These are among the freshest, most deeply moving poems in the book. Take for example “The Present,” quoted here in full:
All of this too taking on the stilted look
of childhood photographs:
my brother and I on a couch, a small box
unwrapped in his lap, both of us gray,
couch and carpet gray, the day beyond the open window
gray and its curtain pulled outside for the moment
by a puff of wind. Hold up, again, delighted,
to the photographer, Mom or Dad,
your first watch, hanging from your hand
like a caught fish, its darting eye grown dull
in a blink.
Like his masters, Kronen delights in puns. These are almost uniformly refreshing and witty and very funny. One of my favorites forms part of a short series entitled “They May Not Mean to, But They Do,” which references a famous (infamous?) Philip Larkin poem of the same title. I’ve chuckled at this poem numerous times since I first read it a number of years ago. Here it is, in full:
No one from our family
had ever left to play baseball.
Go ahead, said my mother,
strike out on your own.
As in his two previous books of poetry, in Homage to Mistress Oppenheimer, Steve Kronen shows himself to be a serious artist, ambitious not for fame but merely (merely!) to make a good poem, that most worthy and difficult enterprise in which “… to speak of time was nearly to speak about love.”
Poet, novelist, essayist, and prolific translator Forrest Gander was born in Barstow, California. The landscapes of Mexico, Arizona, and the Mojave Desert find their place in several books of his poetry, including his most recent, Be With (New Directions, 2018). He has translated poetry from Spain and Latin America, bringing the work of such writers as Pablo Neruda and Raúl Zurita to new audiences. Gander has also written two novels, The Trace (New Directions, 2014) and As a Friend (New Directions, 2008), and received numerous awards in recognition of his writing. He formerly was on the faculty at Brown University. We caught up with him shortly after the 2016 publication of Alice Iris Red Horse: Selected Poems of Yoshimasu Gozo, which Gander edited for New Directions Press.
Danielle Kessinger for The Florida Review:
This is such a fascinating work, Alice Iris Red Horse. You’ve worked with a lot of translations—how was it different working with one where the script is different, when you’re dealing not just with a different language, but different characters?
Forrest Gander:
Gozo Yoshimasu is a completely unique writer. In a way he is moving poetry into a beyond of writing, into a kind of performance. And he uses Korean Hangul and Chinese characters, as well as three different kinds of Japanese scripts plus French, English, and a colored system of writing kanji. In a way, he’s making available to us a whole new way of reading. You can’t read this book like you would an ordinary book.
TFR:
It was very interesting—as an editor, you weren’t just looking at the different pieces but also you had the different translators. It seemed there were also different styles within the translations.
Gander:
That’s right, because his work is so unique and because it’s so open-ended in many ways. The sort of failures of earlier translations of Gozo have been that they flattened out his work a lot. Right now, we’re suddenly availed of a new generation of Japanese translators. And I was in contact with a lot of them and thought the best way to present his work would not be to have a single voice but to have people approaching his work from different directions. Because the book is as much about what translation is, how one would translate this, as it is about the particular translation.
TFR:
Did you always have the idea to have the translators’ notes as part of the book? That was fascinating. Reading how they approached the task of translation was so interesting.
Gander:
It’s just as interesting and sometimes as interesting as the poetry itself because it opens up all of the layers like the night-blooming cereus. Gozo is like the poet of the night-blooming cereus where there’s a flower inside a flower inside a flower. And the translators are able to talk about how they deal with subtleties of trying to bring some of that out, including homophonic play and typographic play that work in Asian languages that don’t work in English at all. In other words, they had to ask, How do you deal with that as an English-language translator?
TFR:
In some places, I noticed they chose to keep some of the katakana and hiragana and kanji. And in others they wrote in Roman characters. There was one poem where the type was in orange and then it said “mikon” [referring to a visual symbol, logo, icon, or avatar]. And I wasn’t certain how much of that was because of how it was laid out in the original or a choice in the translation?
Gander:
It’s trying not to just stuff the strangeness and the fabulousness of the multi-lingual original into a shoe of conventional English language. And so, looking for ways to expand the notion of translation sometimes by including both languages. And Gozo uses symbols that he makes up also that we have to translate or choose to keep the same.
TFR:
I wanted to kind of call my friends in Japan and be like, “I want you to go read the original and then I want you to go read the translations and then I want your feedback. ”
[laughter]
Gander:
But no two people, who read the original, even in Japanese, will have the same reading of his work.
This is part of the ethics of his work. I think of him as a very ethical writer and one who’s concerned with letting other voices speak through his work. He’s always giving credit to where he’s heard information or what came out of a dialogue or who he’s engaging. There’s that sense that he doesn’t want to dominate the performance or interrogation of, in many cases, absence—he’s going to places where people disappeared in Fukushima and trying to make contact with spirits. He’s very influenced by shamanism, by Okinawan shamanism and the notion that we can cross borders of language of the living and the dead, of the spirit world and the daily world.
TFR:
It different than a lot of poetry that one encounters in that it was so worldly—he mentioned so many places he’d been and people that he had met, along with the incorporation of different languages. Very centered in Japan but also very worldly.
Gander:
It’s super worldly. He’s really an international poet. That’s also an aspect of, I think, his ethics—to constantly sort of open up. He gave up—like our own poet Robert Creeley did—the sense of the poem as a beautiful, polished, finished thing. And his poetry is instead an inquiry that continues to question and that doesn’t have a certain closure.
TFR:
This range of languages was new for you, but you have worked on Spanish translations a lot. Do you speak and read Spanish fluently?
Gander:
I do, yes.
TFR:
How is that different when you’re working in a language that you know more intimately?
Gander:
I studied Japanese, but all of my Japanese translations and my work in Japan has been with a fantastic co-translator named Kyoko Yoshida. In Spanish, on the other hand, my translations are solo. The most recent book of Spanish-language translations I’ve done is Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems. The Neruda Foundation discovered these poems that had never been seen in these boxes, folded away, written on menus, and they were published in Latin America and in Spain. And I read about them them and thought, Oh, they’re just squeezing the last juices out of that great grape. And then I saw the poems, and they’re great. He’s just such a great poet, and the poems are fantastic.
Even in Spanish, though, each engagement is really different, too. I’ve done a lot of Mexican translations and translations from the Spanish of Spain and Bolivia and Chile. And each country and area has a completely different dialect and completely different sort of secret words. One of the hardest poems to translate was the shortest one in here, and it was based on an old vernacular for abalone. Abalone in the ’50s in Chile by the sea were often called “orejas del mar,” little ears of the sea.
So Neruda’s got this poem to his wife’s ear that starts to seem to be about cooking his wife’s ear and it’s just this sort of mix between the abalone and his wife’s ear, and it took a lot, it took somebody’s grandmother to tell me, “Wait, I remember… ”
[laughter]
TFR:
Have you spent time in each of the countries that the poetry that you’re translating is rooted in?
Gander:
It’s absolutely necessary. Going to Bolivia to translate Jaime Sáenz was absolutely necessary. Seeing the territory that he lived in, the references that are so common in his books. And the same with Neruda. I spent a lot of time in Chile.
TFR:
Do you find yourself translating not just the language but the culture?
Gander:
You have to translate the culture. The culture is in the language.
TFR:
How do you find it to be both a translator and a poet yourself? Is there something that is fulfilled both in translation and writing your own work, and how are those two things different? How do you carve out space for both?
Gander:
I know some writers and translators who can do both at one time. And lots of writers who multi-task and do multiple manuscripts, but I need close focus on one thing. So when I am working on translations I can’t be working on my own writing and vice versa. But I’ve never felt it as a loss because when I come back to my writing I’ve learned things from the translation—new image repertoires, new ways of using syntax, new particular lexical phrases—that end up feeding my own work. So, though it takes time away, it gives to me and makes me, I think, a deeper poet in English, my own language.
TFR:
So you find that you can see some influences and impacts when you come back to your own work from what you’ve been translating?
Gander:
Absolutamente. [laughter]
TFR:
I happened to stumble across actually a podcast, Poetry Off the Shelf, in which you recommended a poem for the newly elected President Obama (“Poems for President Obama”). You said in that interview, “The election of the President is a kind of wedding with the people.” If you were asked now to come up with a poem for the new president, would you participate in that exercise again?
Gander:
That would be hopeless right now. I know it seems less of a wedding with the people right now than something very unsettling. And I’m afraid Trump would be disinclined to read any poem whatsoever, but if I had to, for him, I’d say, “Donald, start with Whitman.” [chuckle] The sense of inclusivity, the sense of men and women being involved equally. The sense in which Whitman was looking critically at the slave auctions and his political generosity, his care for soldiers who’d been hospitalized… All of that.
Fantastic empathy I think makes anyone a bigger person. And that’s what I think poetry and art can do. They articulate things that we haven’t completely articulated for ourselves that expand what it means to be human.
TFR:
Yes. I came across your poem “Ligature” and in one line it says, “The man writes, I’m not given a subject but I’m given to my subject.” Do you find that to be something you still feel?
Gander:
I think the great poets are given a subject. For instance, someone like the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita—in his early twenties he’s arrested by the Pinochet dictatorship and tortured, and during a period of a few years thousands of people, hundreds who he knows, disappear. They’re killed, and they’re chopped up and dropped into the mouths of volcanoes and the sea. Something like that happens to you and what else are you going to write about? You’ve been given a subject matter that you can’t ever look away from. [Akira] Kurosawa has that nice line, “Don’t look away, never look away.” And sometimes the great subject materials are inevitable I think.
We are pleased to present the final video in our series spotlighting the work of Michael Betancourt.
the Dark Rift is a 2 minute movie produced from a mixture of archival footage and a NASA video of the Moon rotating, synchronized with music by composer Dennis H. Miller, who also produces visual music animations. The title for this movie is a reference to Maya mythology. They believed the “Dark Rift,” a group of interstellar dust clouds that divide the bright band of the Milky Way galaxy lengthwise, and whose alignment with the Sun marks the winter solstice on Earth, was the road to the underworld. Moon imagery demonstrates this fantasy::reality dynamic throughout my work. The multiple windows and glitches appearing throughout this movie appear not as interruptions, but as shifts in resolution. It is only at the end when an astronomical photograph of the Dark Rift begins to appear ‘behind’ the Moon that these windows become physically present as layers of image—it is through the shifting relationship they have to the black areas on screen that they become physical. This change in perception is a shift between abstraction (the windows as glitched parts of the image) and realism (layers lying in front of a more distant background).
Throw it in the forest before it starts to spoil.
Let birds shit it to obscurity.
It won’t be missed. Not by you and not
by the man on the train whose hand
you grabbed by accident. The lights flickered
and you let yourself get carried away by fear.
I don’t know you, the man said, excused
himself away from you. Everyone forgets eventually.
Even the boy whose disappointment you captured
on parchment paper and hung in your bedroom
for years. His body is far gone from your bed
and slowly yours will be too.
Think of it as an extended vacation,
a sweet Valium dream.
You’ll be reborn, a swamp-monster,
slick and diamond-tough.
You’ll tear into an avocado and eat it,
pit and skin and all. And you will have forgotten.
That’s the only way to keep living.
The Light of What Comes After by Jen Town
Bauhan Publishing, 2018
96 pages, paperback, $16.00
Lately I have heard folks in positions of power tell young people to go in fear of irony, that irony is a hiding place for the chronically disengaged and disenchanted, that it signals a deep cynicism when what we need is earnest, active resistance in an increasingly hostile world.
I have a simple quibble with this: without irony there would be no poetry, and without poetry there is no resistance.
Okay, maybe I am oversimplifying.
Maybe what I mean to say is, our language—by its very nature—is chock-full of contradiction, complication, subversion, and elision, but it is with language that we must communicate who we are and who we wish to be.
There is an irony here, and it is the poet’s job to expose it.
Irony, at its best, teases out the difficulties inherent in language and—by extension—in the self’s formation. It is a subtle art and requires a deft hand. Jen Town has such a hand.
“I’ve often been accused of being a latchkey with no latch,” says the speaker in Town’s poem “Spun,” which, like many in her award-winning debut collection The Light of What Comes After, addresses the formation of identity through mediation and speculation.
The I of these poems is shaped in response to social and cultural expectations, creating inside itself a metaphysical window—not to be confused with an emptiness, but rather an opportunity, an opening between representation and reality, like a “space in the air where the ballerina momentarily spun.”
I say opportunity, because Town’s poems provide just that—a new way of seeing, a slant (to reference Dickinson, one of Town’s foremothers) way of exploring a young woman’s coming of age among books, movies, art—from a well-intentioned but sheltered childhood, to the sometimes-hard truths of life as an American woman.
These ironies aggregate throughout the book, are pasted and layered across the self with decoupage artistry. There are accusations in poems “Short Autobiography on Tiptoes” (“she’d been accused to of being too much and always / in earnest”) and “Spun” (“I’ve often been accused of being a latchkey with no latch”) as well as the consequences of growing up “to believe / in the essential good” (“Short Autobiography on Tiptoes”).
In fact, in The Light of What Comes After, “goodness” and “happiness”—two touchstones of a virtuous, Midwestern upbringing—are repeatedly turned over and re-examined, questioned, and prodded, as we see in the poem “Invisible Self-Portraits in a Dark Room”:
I believe myself to be
a sympathetic character
but formed to what
purpose, I’m not sure.
Even more interestingly, in the world of Town’s poems, the self is not only created in the crucible of societal expectations but in the conventions of genre like autobiography, self-portrait, still life, romance, spy novel—poetics the self has internalized and re-contextualized.
For example, in “Needles Piercing Cloth,” Town writes,
It was a world of décolletage,
the diaphanous thrills
of forgetting—lily skin
draped in spring and sugar
sifting through fingers—pollen’s
golden settling on footstool
and ottoman, pie rack
and ice box. A world of garden
walls aflame with bloom.
There is undeniable beauty in the configuration of these artifacts, in the positioning of sensual, musical language, but it is a scene without people. Then (emphasis mine),
and yet: inside we drifted like
smoked bees in a silence
through which clocks
ticked, sound of silver needles
piercing cloth.
The latent violence becomes palpable via domesticity—the surface belies an underground tension. We peer beneath the female-centric, superficial benevolence (needlepoint and décolletage) to see the worry underneath, a technique found again in “Charming,” which opens with, “Her father says You’re living in a fairy tale,” and ends with:
… She gathers flowers by
the roadside, weaves them into a rope for her escape. They shrivel and
curl up into tiny fists, a string of fists that blow apart in the wind.
These are poems that are at once in love with language and at odds with it—as we all must be. Town’s ear for prosody is playful, physical. Her lines are masterful. But what I love most about Town’s poetry is its subtlety. The poems’ balance between despair and delight is so elegantly calibrated, so delicately fashioned, so utterly attentive to the small fractures, fissures, disappointments, and fleeting joys of adulthood, that one could say Town’s sensitivity to language is preternatural and that her nuanced, delightfully subversive voice is a revelation. So, let me say it: Town’s The Light of What Comes After is a revelation.
She—like many of us—was a girl who grew up to be a woman, both charmed by the trimmings and trappings of her gender’s norms and highly critical of them. She faces the gaps between expectations and realities with a wry wit and realizes—rightly so—that who we think we are and who others think we are—creates a tension rife with both humor and pain. This is resistance.
Town’s poems aren’t for the faint-hearted, though they are very much the product of a delicate sensibility.
Oh, the irony!
As hard as she can, Griselda pinches the skin between her thumb and pointing finger. The pain is a distraction. Earlier today, her dad grabbed her heavy metal t-shirts, favorite black hoodie, and smelly socks and stuffed them inside a black suitcase. The suitcase now stands by the open front door, and Griselda can see her dad. He’s outside by the yellowing yard with his head tucked under the hood of a fender-dented Ford pickup. Griselda sits on the couch while her dad fidgets with Craftsman tools. He’s trying to get his truck started by working on the carburetor, which Griselda hopes he can’t fix.
Her mother left them eight months ago. Since then, her dad has gone weeks without bathing, days without eating.
After an hour of tinkering, he tries turning on the ignition. The engine flutters. It’s a false start, and Griselda is relieved. She breathes deeply, tilts her head back, and gazes at the sparkled popcorn ceiling. The music coming out of the truck’s speakers reminds her of when her dad, in exchange for a powerful sound system, put several crisp fifty-, twenty-, and ten-dollar bills in the palm of a vendor at the Roadium open-air swap-meet that had once been a drive-in theater.
Singing along to his music, Griselda is dismayed that she knows all the words to “No te metas con mi cucu.” She didn’t know she had that in her, and she hates herself because the song’s corny rhymes embarrass her. She’s sixteen, after all, and won’t admit that she likes the song, so she shakes her head as if the sudden movement will scare off the Spanish lyrics.
Her dad steps on the gas pedal, revving the engine. Griselda presses her lips together, tightening and rolling them into a thin line. The rumble of the motor intensifies, but soon, it peters out. Griselda relaxes. Her shoulders droop down, and her lips return to their normal, full shape, with an undefined Cupid’s bow. Getting off the couch, she closes the door, sticks a mixtape of Metallica and Iron Maiden songs into the home stereo system, and turns the dial to ten. The cassette is a gift from Sergio. He’s the scruffy-looking teen who wears a black Misfits t-shirt, rolled up at the sleeves. He’s the only boy in tenth grade that has a tattoo. On his left arm, there’s a black and grey skull, which looks more like a deformed mushroom. Griselda likes Sergio’s badly done tattoo mainly because she likes him.
The speakers throb with fast, angry, and loud sounds, vibrating the floor and walls surrounding Griselda. She bites her teeth and digs her nails into her palms. Once the truck gets repaired, Griselda knows her dad will come in, wearing his blue trucker hat, motor-oil-stained jeans, brown work boots, and smelling of cigarettes and liquor. Despite any outbursts from her, he’ll grab her suitcase, toss it in the rear of the pickup, and take her away. Seven days ago, he told Griselda he was moving back to Méjico, where things were simpler, but that he wasn’t going to take her with him. Griselda had felt her body, especially her chest, tighten.
The bottom tip of her nose is red, slightly swollen, and stings when touched. Yesterday, without her dad’s knowledge or permission, she took all the money he had out of his wallet. And with her best friend, Sylvia, encouraging her, Griselda got her septum and navel pierced. She also wanted to get her tongue and eyebrow pierced but couldn’t afford it.
Standing in front of the mirror, Griselda yanks off her green army boots, and slides out of her black jeans. She walks in her underwear and makes her way into the kitchen and grips the sharp knife her dad uses to cut his carne asada on Sundays. Griselda kneels to where her pants lie and starts stabbing and scraping. Her jeans become frayed, almost destroyed. Metallica’s “Ride the Lightning” comes to a stop. Outside, the truck engine maintains its roar. It doesn’t stop. The edges of her eyes turn red. She drives the knife into the floor, leaves it sticking up, and pulls her pants to her waist.
Griselda goes to the bathroom and finds her father’s beard trimmer. She holds it for a few seconds and then begins to shave her head. Long, thick hairs clog the trimmer’s blade, and Griselda has to keep removing them to clean it. But even with the blade cleaned, the trimmer doesn’t always cut all the way through; instead, it pulls the hairs. Griselda likes how it feels and pushes the blade hard against her head, inflaming the skin.
Her father walks in and leans on the doorway. He lifts a beer that perspires little, wet beads and sips it. Grime blackens his hands and streaks his cheeks and forehead. He looks like a zombie, she thinks. After he glances at the messy floor and sink, he observes Griselda. She smirks. And he says, “Jesus, Gris, you really want to piss off your mother, don’t you?”
Griselda’s smirk disappears. She wipes her eyes, and over her mouth she smears the heavy-black lipstick she took from the Rite Aid on Redondo Beach Boulevard. Looking at herself in the mirror, she says, “No. Not really.”
“You missed a spot.” He reaches to touch her buzz cut, but Griselda moves, avoiding his hand. She takes a hard, wet-sounding sniff and places the trimmer over the sink’s countertop.
He shrugs his tired shoulders. “Orale. Vamonos ya. Your mother’s waiting,” he says.
When she stomps out of the bathroom, her shoulder digs into her father’s chest. It feels hollow to Griselda, and she tells him, “About time you got that piece of shit to work.” She carries the suitcase outside. It’s heavier than she’d expected, but she’s still able to toss it in the back of the pickup. Before her father jumps in and pulls the Ford away, Griselda ejects his Sonora Dinamita cassette out of the truck’s in-dash stereo and plays her mixtape instead because he hates esa musica. Stuffing his cassette into her pocket, she’s not too sure what she’ll do with it. As he sits, buckles up, and drives, Griselda’s forehead, covered with bits of hair, thumps the glass on the passenger side window and rests there. They pass houses, cars, and she stares at the white lines on the freeway. Picking up speed, the truck shakes and screeches, and the lines become a blur.
There is shadow
of a sparrow
left on the window ledge
weeks after the poor bird
had been removed.
The sun melted
a permanent silhouette, tufts
of feathers, and a faint point
of beak still visible
with three days of rain.
Something is wrong.
I had a dream
where I said
this is a dream.
I’m certain
no one noticed
except my father
who knew I’d try
the salted rhubarb
and pomegranate seeds
that wept on my fingers.
Beets turn
into sugar sweetly
on the verge of burn and
I am guilty with happiness
of a kind,
where I survive
as a bird,
an egret
strange and white as my
father’s mustache, a telltale
for his murdered brother.
I don’t say
I’m happy,
a sort of guilty luck
that I love because it fleets
never follows, ripe to the point of rot.
What if nothing moves
still as sleep and my breath
is not enough?
I dream I am
as steel as a swallow
brazen head near bow and drink
its forked tail a salute
between death and habit.
The definition of egret
is wrong,
if I don’t hold
the long legs in absolute stillness.
Tonight, I find a cat
near the shore. Let him eat,
he will eat, he will return to
animal, not pet. I say, here
kitty, kitty. He reveals his belly
to me and all who continue to pass.
I have met people like this.
Three egrets stretch
above me in an arm full of rain
I am older now than my Uncle
dead at 36
all of history caught
in those white wings.
He too was killed for his
feathers, a plume of decoration
in a woman’s hat.
Demi-Gods, by Eliza Robertson
Bloomsbury, 2017
230 pages, paper, $26
I have been a fan of Canadian novelist Eliza Robertson’s work since reading her short story collection, Wallflowers, released in 2014. Her work shows the precision and intensity of her gaze coupled with an easy and skillful exploration of language that always makes her work a pleasure to read. In Demi-Gods, her first novel, Robertson shows us a deeper settling into character and consciousness often not possible in the short story form. Full of secret interiorities and occupied with the essential question of how we view ourselves and how this choice affects our life’s suite of movements, Demi-Gods pulses with the energy of inner and outer life. It is remarkably consistent in focus, poetic and lucid in its articulations about the human spirit.
The novel is divided into three main parts that take place over different time periods in the narrator, Willa’s, past, followed by a short fourth section set in what is roughly the narrative present. Predominantly set in the ’50s and early ’60s, Willa recounts parts of her late childhood, adolescence, and young womanhood, spent in Salt Spring Island (between Vancouver Island and mainland BC) and, later, California. The narrative crux focuses around Willa’s relationship with Patrick, a sort of half-brother: he is the younger son of her mother’s new boyfriend and arrives on the island with the disruptive energy of unhinged youth. Willa is nine and Patrick is eleven and their relationship is charged: already he ropes her into games of strangeness and degradation. The first game they play is so surprising and aberrant I felt shock and surety that I was in the hands of a capable, original voice: “The vulgarity of the action made me want to laugh—it excited me in a strange way. I could pass all of his tests, even the naughty ones.”
From the relationship springs the core tension of the novel, that is, the power in the act of viewing one another and how this is tethered to the motion of control. Willa’s act of writing, in seeking to rationalize her past, is itself an act of control—we see how the past she is trying to articulate moves and shifts, as do her relationships and her impressions of them. Her fate of being twinned to Patrick, of being reflected in his image, is itself susceptible to warps of movement, to slips and loosenings of focus: themes which transfer themselves to the characters and the drama as the novel develops. We end up on a roiling sea where everything is tilting and the characters are taking turns at being drugged. Robertson seeks to show that there is no archetypal relationship, and yet everything is archetypal. There is always the push-pull of motion, of attention. People make each other do things because they can. Rather than seeking to understand why, Robertson unfurls this type of relationship in its mottled and kaleidoscopic essence. It is inhabited, and not explained: “We sensed the other person, of course, if anything our sense of the other person had intensified, but we allowed each other that civility, to pretend not to know we were watched.”
Because the action takes place in one person’s memory, Robertson can give us the action in full, aesthetically beautiful prose. Her words have a tack—a corporeality that fits with the narration described: “Dad let us live like beach clams. We burrowed in the sand and sucked nutrients from the salt, sand fleas exploring our noses like luminous shrimp. We built clam gardens. We cleared the rock from our beach and constructed a wall. The clams stretched their tongues and spat water between our toes.” Robertson’s emphasis on reflection and vision is repeated throughout the work in instances of stillness and quiet beauty: “Luke’s gaze hung on the lake, which glittered beyond the horsetails and spirals of blackberry […] The water glinted sharply—at that moment, it seemed a lake reflected more light than the sea. The ocean absorbed light, held the sun. A lake spat the sun at you.” There shapes she forms with her sentences are visceral. The work shows a focus on the gestural, which makes words feel like they are touching their subjects: “It took an hour to reach home because I rode one-handed, cradling the jar of cream against my belly-button. […] I wanted to go home. I wanted to hide this cream under my bed, then tiptoe along the trunk of my arbutus tree and think about the boy who drove the dairy cart.”
As the plot develops, Willa’s impressions become more adult-like: she sees her sister marry and then the fallouts of an unhappy union; she knows what it is to have sex. Willa, like Robertson, is an observer and is not drawn to explicitness. It is as though conveying feelings plainly or clear openness would break a spell or not describe the true state of things sufficiently. There are implied understandings, and there is a sense of uncertainty and equivocality that comes with the awareness of not being entirely in control of fate: “I could feel the future encroach as a shadow encroaches on a day when you spend every hour outside and fail to notice the sun slipping below the horizon.”
It is appropriate to end on an excerpt, displaying the essence of the book, Willa’s ultimate solitude, and the turning trajectory of the novel as it is occurring:
When I reached the side, I leaned over the gunwale. A school of fish hung suspended in the water, the light glinting off their bodies before the fleet lifted and tilted into the tide. I could hear Joan and Kenneth fighting in the galley. I tried to block out the sound, inhaled the ocean’s salt on my skin, the tang of seagull shit dried onto the deck. Slowly, larger shadows overtook the shadows of the helm. Then these darknesses—spilled by masts, the boom—were overtaken by the largest shadow, of Earth turning away from the sun. I closed my eyes. The wind fingered the curl that had dropped from my braid, dangling down the nape of my neck.
Languid in feeling yet tautly controlled, Demi-Gods looks at the interiorities we can’t explain to ourselves: what we show and what remains hidden. The final image leaves us with a full tidal pool, suggesting the underbelly of the ringing surface of the world, a multiplicity of hidden movements: “a pool gathered in the lap of a rock with mossy bunches of anemones and gunnel fish and barnacles.” How can we contain what we see when we look backwards? What is uncovered by the action of doing so?
I have been a fan of metaphor since I learned to read, first in English and then eventually in rusty, copper Spanish. This is not a metaphor. My grandma has become a puppet.
It would be a good metaphor if the circumstances were slightly different. Her body had started to change in the past few years and, though she stayed human, her physique lent itself to a description of her as a marionette. She had clunky, white orthopedic shoes that looked oversized and cartoonish when she took her small, concerted steps. Abuela’s back was permanently hunched over, appearing as if she were being suspended by invisible strings at the shoulders. She lost a lot of weight, and the lack of fat in her face combined with her wrinkled skin made her head look huge like a Muppet’s. But Abuela was still herself then, flesh and bones and dust.
Then she become a puppet and no one knew what to do about it. Papi wouldn’t admit it, but there were signs that her metamorphosis was coming, and it wasn’t just those dreadful orthopedic shoes.
For a long time, Abuela lived in an apartment by herself. Her relationship with my Abuelo had been another precious thing lost to migration, and she’d never bothered to date again. She had her children, who joined her in los Yunai Estais after she’d been cleaning houses, theaters, and embassies for nearly a decade, for nearly minimum wage. But, of course, Papi and his siblings had grown up and left Abuela in that musty-smelling apartment building.
We visited her one afternoon and couldn’t avoid the putrid smell that’d snuck into her home. The whole building smelt of old-person. In less kind words, the carpet and walls smelt of dying. But that morning Abuelita’s apartment did not smell just of dying, but already of death. In the fridge, there were rotten casseroles and the unquestionable stink of not-so-fresh queso fresco. Papi managed to save five slices from the loaf of bread, but everything else went into the trash.
Abuela claimed that she hadn’t smelt the food going bad. Her nose hardly worked anymore, she told us in an attempt to gain our pity. So, we went with her the the supermarket and bought a fridge full of groceries. Two weeks later, they sat in the fridge, largely untouched and mostly spoiled. My grandma had begun to lose weight, but she was still human.
Eventually, Mami convinced Papi to let Abuela move into our home in the suburbs. Abuela said they were being ridiculous, that she was fine in her apartment, that she was happy. But Mami was worried that she’d fall one day, and that no one would be there to help her. The weight loss also worried Mami.
Abuela had a large gut throughout my childhood, the kind that makes you wonder what would happen if you tipped her over and tried rolling her down the street. But by the time she moved into my old bedroom, her gut was gone. If you tipped her over, she’d plop onto the sidewalk like a plank of wood.
There’s a purse that Abuela loves. It’s a knock-off Louis Vuitton that she picked up in MacArthur park a year or so before the rotting fridge fiasco. When she became a puppet, a version of the bag was stitched to her side, though it was made of felt and with less details than the original. But the purse sticks to her side, even as she lays tossed on the ground when there’s no one to hold up the wooden operating cross.
Before she was a puppet, Abuela swung that purse around and hit Papi straight across the cheek, leaving him with neck pains he’d complain about for weeks. She was accusing him of stealing money from her purse. Papi assured her that, no, he hadn’t taken anything from her, but she continued. She remembered putting a stack of twenty-dollar bills in the small pocket of her purse, and now she couldn’t find them. Papi had stolen them, she yelled, the ungrateful son of his father and then she pulled back her flabby arm and took aim.
In his shock, Abuela made a run for it. She pushed past me, with a strength that her limp marionette arms no longer possess. That the woman who sang me lullabies about baby chicks and coyotes would lay her hands on me without any of the tenderness I was used to nearly brought me to tears. It left me immobile as she opened the front door and ran out into the rain-soaked neighborhood with her Louis Vuitton fake.
Mami and Papi got into the minivan and went out searching for her. They spotted her through a sprinkled windshield, waiting at the wrong bus stop. Her plan, my parents would tell me after I’d wiped the bags under my ears dry, was to ride the bus back to her apartment. She had forgotten the bus route to get there, though she’d ridden it often for nearly a decade. It’d slipped her mind that she no longer had a lease on that musty pink apartment.
The home we moved Abuela into after the 75-year-old runaway situation didn’t smell of dying. It was sterile, and the hallways of doors where hers stood was fenced off from the rest of the living facility. A brass gate separated those who could remember and those who couldn’t. A nurse would press a four-number code into a small keypad, and the door would open up to let us through.
Abuela lived in the section for people whose memories were turning into small wisps, ready to float away from their temples and into the clouds. Each of the tenants had their own room, but they’d take all their meals in a large, open-floor dining area. The nurses would go knock on Abuela’s door when it was dinner time and she hadn’t arrived to eat. Her mind was a lost cause, but there was no reason her body had to be as well.
Every visit gave us a clue that we ignored, opting for silence the way Papi had taught Mami and Mami had taught me. One day, Papi asked her how she used to make Christmas tamales. Being the man’s man that he is, he’d never stepped in the kitchen to actually make the dish. But he knew the steps well enough to know that his mother had forgotten them completely.
A professor had assigned an oral history project, so I’d decided to interview Abuela about the war and the way it had affected her migration. She began telling me the story, and the most graphic of details were sharp and clear. She recounted how an army soldier took a machete to a pregnant woman’s stomach because they feared that her baby was a communist. She told me that the guerilleros befriended her favorite cow and three days later murdered it for the meat.
When I prompted her to tell me her immigration story, she’d have to correct herself. Papi, who was sitting just few feet away, eventually led her along, reminding her that she’d gone to Puerto Rico before moving to Miami. He’d stayed in El Salvador for the first two year she’d been in San Juan, he told her, the hurt reverberating in his voice.
Soon she didn’t know our names. She called us all “mijo” or “mija.” Eventually, she opted to simply use “linda,” regardless of the gender of the person she was speaking to. Slowly, we became nearly strangers to us. My grandmother treated us the way she’d treat the mail man or a friend’s relative she was meeting for the first time. There was a sense of trust, but nothing more.
In the months before her metamorphosis, she often repeated a single phrase, over and over. He jaw falling unhinged, then rising again, and then down again. It wasn’t a coherent phrase either, but rather a string of muffled noise. Now, I’m realizing that maybe Abuela was speaking a clandestine language puppets speak when a ventriloquist isn’t pulling at their lips.
Though Abuela was human on all of those trips, I pretended that she wasn’t. Like the other people in this caged home for the forgetful, she’d lost her stories. I’d smile a hollow smile at them, tell Abuela that I loved her even though I knew she didn’t recognize me, and then slink away to a corner of the room.
When she became a puppet, my resentment for her grew. Papi and Mami refused to bury her. She’s not dead, they’d insist, pointing to the place where fish-wire strings met her joints. Mami grabbed my hand and pressed it against Abuela’s skin. The new texture of felt was kinder than the soggy, old leather Abuela’s skin used to feel like, but I still pulled my hand away quickly.
Abuela the Puppet hung in my parent’s home for years. Not wanting to be disrespectful, she watched over us from a hook in our living room–hovering as we watched TV, ate dinner, got into loud arguments. Abuela was the only one who saw when when I snuck a man into the house when I was visiting one Christmas break.
Most days she just hung there, but one weekend, when I was visiting in my few free days from graduate school, she began to sing. Her voice was stronger and clearer than it had been for years before her transformation.
“Ay, ay, ay, ay, canta, y no llores. Porque cantando se alegran, cielito lindo los corazones.”
It was my favorite song as a little girl, so I knew she was singing it just for me. My parents stared at me with a concerned look when I told them. When I tugged at Abuela’s strings and moved her mouth up and down my hands, trying to prove to my parents what I’d heard, she didn’t budge. My grandmother remained limp and unmoving. My father placed a wrinkled hand on my shoulder and told me that it might be a sign that I had that memory-denigrating termite Abuela suffered from for so long. It usually skipped a generation.
Mami and Papi died a year-and-a-half apart, leaving me to deal with my grandmother. I hated her. I hated her so much for taking so much space for so long, for forgetting my name, for making a fool of me with her lullaby. I hated her for the termites she’d left in my brain, and for all the pain she was going to put my children through. At church serves, a very seldom occurrence in those days, I’d prayed for death. God, diosito lindo, please don’t make me a puppet.
Online, I found a company that stored family members in Abuela’s condition indefinitely. They’d bought out an old lot of storage units and repurposed them to accommodate rows and rows of human-sized puppets. Most of the puppets were of people who’d formerly fled countries ravaged by wars funded in part by the United States, so when I dropped Abuela off they placed her in the unit marked CENTRAL AMERICA, with the other shrunken caramel grandmothers displaced from the isthmus. As the door to the storage unit closed, Abuela’s jaw twitched. No sound came out. The shell of a woman disappeared into the dark, silent once more.
For our kidneys cratered
like the swollen moon
For the way time hangs
on our bones
For our confused lungs, blooming
white and yellow destruction
For our exhausted hearts, roused
to expansion by want and need
For the loss of the ancient stars
in our blood and marrow
For the mines of our bodies
that generate iridescent crystals and stones
For the dark shadows shifting
in our souls
And our inability to escape them
In celebration of Indigenous People’s Day (October 8, 2018), we are happy to present this interview with Joy Harjo.
Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is a member of the Muscogee/Creek Nation. She is the author of thirteen books—including poetry collections, children’s literature, and memoir—for which she has received numerous awards including the 2002 Pen/Open Book for A Map to the Next World (W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), the 1991 William Carlos Williams Award for In Mad Love and War (Wesleyan, 1990), and her second American Book Award for her memoir, Crazy Brave (W. W. Norton & Company, 2013). She is also a renowned saxophonist and vocalist.
Danielle Kessinger for The Florida Review:
The book that you’ve recently released, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings—what number of books is this for you?
Joy Harjo:
I think it’s the eighth poetry book, but I have other books. I have a memoir, two children’s books, a collaborative book with an astronomer, and CDs and music. So that’s the eighth poetry book.
TFR:
Do you find with each book you put them together a little bit differently, in how you approach the assembling in the order of the poems and . . .
Harjo:
Every one is different. It’s like children. [laughter] Yeah. Every one has its own story.
TFR:
Before the poems, you have these italicized sections in your books, and I was curious whether you wrote those after you put the poems in order, or if those were something that you already had that you worked in?
Harjo:
I worked those in to fit, because I’m a horn player too, so they’re like sax riffs. And I think all literature is essentially oral. So it’s another way that I have of saying, “Okay. Here, let’s do a little riff here. And a little riff here.” [laughter] I think most of those I wrote after assembling the poems.
TFR:
I went to your reading this morning, which was just lovely, and I was going to ask if you found it very different to read to poets versus to an audience that was there for music. But you started out with a poem that was very much a song, and I thought it’s kind of both. But do you approach different audiences differently, the poetry audience and the music audience?
Harjo:
I don’t know. I do what I do. I started playing horn when I was almost . . . when I was thirty. And I had been doing poetry for some time, and I already had a name in poetry, and I started adding music. And I thought, All of my poetry audience will come over to the music. But it’s not so. A lot of the poets say, “Well, we just want the poetry, straight. We don’t want anything with it.” And I have a whole music audience who, even though I’m using the poems, they don’t know anything about the poetry.
TFR:
So you find it’s very separated. Two different audiences that don’t have a lot of crossover?
Harjo:
Often, it is. I thought there would be a lot of crossover, and there’s some but not a lot.
TFR:
How does it feel different to be doing a spoken poem versus doing a song, and the feedback that you get from one group or the other?
Harjo:
I think I’ve always seen poetry as a matter of voice because of the way I came to it through my mother writing songs. To me, it’s pretty much the same voice. That’s what I’ve come to. There’s a voice in my saxophone voice, and if you hear my horn voice, my singing voice, the speaking voice, the poetry voice, it’s the same voice. It just expresses itself in different ways.
TFR:
When you edit your work, do you read the pieces aloud to check for the sounds?
Harjo:
I have to. [chuckle] I have to. That’s all part of it. I always tell that to my students: “Read them aloud.” And then there’s the next level of reading aloud. There’s reading aloud to yourself and, in a way, you can always find what’s knotted up or what’s not working. You can usually know, usually. But then, I have found there’s other levels of that, the next level is reading to someone else. Then you will hear more of what’s not working. But the biggest test is reading it to an audience. And I have made the mistake many times of reading new poems to an audience that are too fresh. And I’ll be up in front of the audience with a pen. I’ll make sure if I’m going to do that, I’ll take a pen, because then I hear right away what’s not working. [laughter]
TFR:
Do you find you get good edits out of that, even if you wished . . . you had saved it for later?
[laughter]
Harjo:
Yes, I do. You know how it is, you get so excited when you have a new poem and, then you want to read it, and I’ll have to tell myself, “Okay, just take some time with this.” Because you know, by now . . . if you don’t know by now, [laughter] then you should know by now that you’re going to be full of shame and horror the next day if you don’t let the poem have its time to settle.
TFR:
Have you had pieces that were published in, for instance, a literary magazine and then you put them in a book, and then you find yourself changing things prior to the publication of the second time or the third time?
Harjo:
Yes. One of the poems in Conflict Resolution, “Everybody Has a Heartache,” was published in Poetry Magazine for a Split This Rock conference. And I said, “It’s not ready.” They really liked the poem, the editor of that little section really loved the poem. I said, “But I know it’s not there yet.” But they wanted it anyway, so I gave it to them. So it’s much revised in the book. And even in the title poem, “Conflict Resolution,” there’s a whole section I would totally rewrite or take out.
TFR:
There was a lot of myth and cultural story woven into this book. And I taught history and English for many years, and as I was reading it, I kinda felt like I had done a disservice because of how little we talk about the stories of culture rather than just the history. Because it should be a part of history, and it’s often not. What do you feel is the importance of people’s individual stories?
Harjo:
History is stories. It’s just what’s called history is usually the old. I think the feminists came up with it, history meaning “his story.” And yet, ultimately, history is the stories of everyone who was there, including the plants, including the animals, including the rooms things happen in. [laugh] It’s all part of the story.
TFR:
Do you find that where you are writing influences what you are writing? If you’re home or if you’re traveling, do you find you come to different kinds of subject matter?
Harjo:
I’ve wondered about that. I remember when I moved to Hawaii for eleven years, and I had always wanted to be there, in the Pacific. I love the Pacific. But it was startling—even as much as I felt so at home and I loved the water and I got into outrigger canoe racing—that I had been so ingrained in the Southwest and Oklahoma where I’m from and that history. To move into another place was very difficult for my writing, at least for a while. A lot of the writing from that time . . . I don’t think is my best.
TFR:
Do you find that writing in the Southwest the landscape lends itself to being spare with words and conscious of every one?
Harjo:
I don’t know if it did that, but when I started writing I was learning the Navajo language. And I loved that . . . New Mexico, I went there to go to Indian boarding school and came back home for a little bit, for about a year or two, and then went back. But the poetry, the spirit of the poetry came to me there. And it’s so much a part of me. I miss it so much. I’ll be in Tuscon next week. I’m excited about that. But I really miss the Southwest. It’s very much a part of my poetry, as is the story of my people. As is Hawaii, the water and the spirit of the water, who is one of my biggest teachers. So, places do affect me. I travel. I’ve always been a traveler. Even as a child when we didn’t go anywhere, books were my means of traveling, as well as walking and trying. They gave me that sense of discovery, discovery of new places.
TFR:
You’ve talked about the importance of paying attention to the sunset and what you can let go at that time period. Do you feel like in your travels, you have to make a conscious effort to be aware of time and the sun and what’s going on outside of, maybe, the rooms that you’re in, more so than when you’re home?
Harjo:
Yes, they’re like markers. You realize we’re all in the ceremony of sunrise. I was watching the sun come up in my room . . . It was nice. I usually request a room that has an east view, but I didn’t and I had an east room anyway. What cracked me up is the guy said, “Oh yeah, and you have a balcony, too,” but my balcony looks out over a parking garage and the freeway. I didn’t get an ocean view with this trip. [laughter]
TFR:
Conflict Resolution for Human Beings includes this poem set in Vancouver about walkabout, and you had the dead umbrella and the broken wings. And as much as it’s hard to travel a lot, do you also find value in it, in that it brings you to pieces you might not have otherwise written?
Harjo:
Oh, sure. I think, I would say probably three-fourths. [chuckle] Most of those poems are set in places, like the one in British Columbia. One of the earlier ones, I’m in a hotel. Louis Armstrong’s band had been there, and the hotel had turned to trash, and yet the King of Jazz had been there. They resurrect . . . That’s one of the first little riffs that starts off the book. And, yeah, there’s a lot of horn, meeting horn players, out playing horn on the street. And even death appears. That’s a traveler. [laughter]
TFR:
Yes, yes, yes.
Harjo:
But, yes, there are also several poems in there about Hawaii, about Oklahoma. I get to travel quite frequently.
TFR:
So often when reading bios of you, they very much emphasize the history of and your role in Native literature in the US. Do you ever feel that it’s kind of a burden to be speaking, in some people’s minds, for a whole group of people as opposed to just for yourself?
Harjo:
I can’t think about that because I know that I don’t speak for anybody else. I just follow that voice that was given to me to take care of. So I can’t even speak on behalf of my family. [laughter] You know how most families are? Everybody’s so different. But it’s true that I have often been, through the years, the token or the person that’s speaking on behalf of anyone that’s not your all-American male. [laughter] So it’s an impossible situation, an even bizarre situation sometimes. And there are many Native writers and many Native poets who also have a place. They have a place, though a lot of people aren’t going for, or they don’t wind up in a large of an arena. Their poetry or their songs are very important at home, and that’s what’s important. It’s not about being at a big-book thing. One of the first times I went back to the ceremonial ground, and they have a speaker that goes around, and I remember when he came by my camp, he says, “And you can leave your university books, all of that behind because this is not the place for them.” It’s a different world. There’s literature there, and there’s a place. A different system.
TFR:
Do you find that the people in your life have a great awareness of you as a poet? Do you find that they have an expectation of not being included in a poem or being included in a poem?
Harjo:
I guess I don’t do a lot of using my poetry as a tool or wielding my poetry . . .
TFR:
Yeah. [laughter]
Harjo:
Not like a novelist or a . . . My memoir though, that was another story. But I don’t think they worry about it too much. And it was funny when I lived in Hawaii—people knew me as a canoe paddler, someone who paddled canoes, outrigger canoes, and they knew me. I remember going down to the Kapalama Post Office to mail out a box, and the woman looked at my name and she looked at me, and she says, “Oh, you’re the one that makes those really good cookies.” [laughter] So I thought, “Okay,” that’s what I was. People had no idea of my life as a poet.
TFR:
Do you find that when you were paddling, that that act of paddling, that the movement ever served to have words come to you that you would use later, that that was a meditative state? Or were you very much focused on just the paddling itself?
Harjo:
It’s kind of all of that. When you’re involved in an act that can be very strenuous, there’s different ones when you’re racing and then when you’re practicing. I almost said rehearsing. And then when you’re doing this practicing, you’re focused. You’re really focused. But there is something about the rhythm. And so much does come to you, even as so much falls away. And being out there at sunset or at sunrise is just incredible. And moving in a rhythm.
TFR:
Do you ever get on the water at night, after dark?
Harjo:
I have been, and it was kind of dangerous.
[laughter]
We were out one time with the canoe club with our group, and we went way out and we got in trouble because we were out near the lane where the ships were coming in, got beeped at. So then we were paddling back and it got dark, and it’s kind of . . . It’s cool, but then you can hear the wave action where you have to come in. And you have to know where to come in, and so that gets a little . . . dangerous. Maybe like poetry.
As part of The Florida Review and Aquifer: TFR Online’s celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month and Latinx contributors, we are featuring three videos by multi-media artist, theorist, and historian Michael Betancourt. This week we present the second video in this series, Dancing Glitch. Betancourt’s work will also be featured in the upcoming fall print issue of The Florida Review.
Loie Fuller, the American choreographer and dancer, was an early inspiration for Cubist abstraction with her Serpentine Dance; her performance in Lumiere vue no. 76 (1896) provided the original source material for this visual music work.
These poems are from Villarán’s forthcoming collection open pit.
you were born in davis
in a small inflatable pool
in april
during those first weeks, you would often wake up crying
in the middle of the night. without really knowing how
i would pick you up from the crib and hold you tight against
my chest, until you calmed down, and fell asleep again
i liked staying like this for a while
staring at the darkness
that would become the wall
imagine us in the car a sunny day the windows down
driving to the beach 88.3 driving and all those cars next to us driving
always in movement the highway is always full because the more
lanes we build the more cars are attracted to the smell of concrete
and white arrows painted over seemingly endless black surfaces:
the original infrastructure of future battlefields
imagine thousands of small highways running inside of you
all those cars driving somewhere taking something someone like us
perhaps to the beach with your mother so we would have the cooler
and the tent the umbrellas and the surfboards imagine all those cars
going somewhere taking something driving someone imagine all that
movement all that continuous movement the displacement dislocation
bodies inside metal vehicles on black surfaces running
imagine thousands of small really really small
a huge conveyor belt a network of swollen arteries imagine an open pit
an open wound the skin rupturing imagine your leg imagine your arm
imagine my leg imagine my arm
a big bag of tendons and ligaments necrotic tissue a bundle of nerve
tissue imagine bags of plastic inside your stomach lining your
intestines and climbing up your esophagus through the larynx
the lack of oxygen
imagine these huge pond type structures with plastic geothermal
liners stretching across the mountains dissecting the mountains
becoming the new mountain the only landscape leaching ponds laid
out in endless geometrical patterns
imagine every single muscle every fiber every synapse every neuron
needed for you to type with your right index finger:
n. n. n.
the letter n
imagine thousands of small highways pulsating inside of you
imagine it never stopping
thousands of small highways and the cars and the people and the things
and the places they want to take those things to because that’s what we
do we go places with things and we use metal vehicles that travel on
seemingly endless black surfaces just imagine all of this happening all
the time all the time happening all the time always
this highway
there’s no outside
this open pit
this wound this rupture this crevice inside body this highway all the time
always
what i’m trying to say miqel is:
just imagine thousands of small highways always running inside of you
imagine everything that’s needed for this to happen
all the time
always
now imagine an open pit a large open pit in the middle of a valley
surrounded by fractured mountains
i think that’s how it works
we have that pit
we keep running: faster faster faster
birds die and their stomachs are filled with plastic
whales die and their stomachs are filled with plastic
the united states economy gets a billion-dollar daily shot in its arm
imagine your arm
i’m thinking of mine
we have that pit
and we fill it with these things
we keep running faster always faster
now imagine us at the beach, imagine it being sunny again but not
too hot, imagine the sky punctuated by a few curious clouds, your
mother would be smiling, she’s beautiful when she smiles
it’s still happening
i don’t know what it is
i’m not sure what to do about it either
but i know it’s happening, all the time, always, relentless
we have that pit, it’s open, really open
and things are exploding and people are breaking and burning and dying
and we’re distracted
because we love the sand
the salt in the water
the cool air
The water edges closer, and there is nothing she can do to stop it. Nowhere she and her daughters can go.
Once at the very rear of the property, fenced in by sedges and cypress trees, it has risen past its own borders and laps at the ground only a few feet away from the back porch. Funny how the pond itself reminds her of her daughters, neither girl held anymore by the boundaries of childhood, of dollhouses and that insatiable little-girl-need to nurture families of stuffed animals and generations of digital pets, and, yes, occasionally, an actual baby doll with a permanent marker black eye. Now they too have risen, both girls taller than her, their curved bodies full, overflowing jeans that were once baggy, spilling out of bra cups that were once collapsed. It’s time they knew.
On this overcast day of no wind and no fog, the earth has slowed its breakneck spinning to a crawl. Inside the house, the girls are silent as usual. Lately it seems only their bodies belie their presence—the shuffle of bare feet, the hiss of hair and fabric. She calls them now, leads them outside, shows them the water.
“See?” She points. For the first time the water, usually cloudy and a green so dark that it’s a color without a name, is perfectly clear. They can all see it. Past the snails that are close to the shore, past the reedy legs of the wood stork, past the coral rocks and sandy beds of the bluegills, they can all see the dark, see the place where the bottom has given way. It is there that two eyes shimmer at the edge of darkness and rows of teeth as wide as trees, as sharp as razor grass, open and close slowly, and yet the surface of the water is undisturbed, still as death.
“This is here,” she tells them. “Even when the wind blows across the surface and makes glittering waves and swirling eddies and whips your hair across your face and rustles leaves so that all you hear is that seductive call to shhhhh. Even when the sky is bare of clouds, a blue so blue, it penetrates the murk, fools you into seeing some other color. Even when the water is so still and the sun is so bright, you can gaze down and see yourself and the sky together. Even when you are smiling down at your own pretty face and at your very own cloudless sky. Even then.”
She tells them, “Beware.” The girls nod solemnly, and they all go inside. But it’s much later, when the night has come and the winds returned and the earth has gone back to its delirious spin, that she hears them.
They are laughing, giggling, just as they once did and always seemed to do. And yet their laughter is different, and that difference stops her, hands suspended over the fish she has just fileted. She listens, her fingertips on the delicate feather of spine and ribs the knife has exposed.
“Now it’s my turn,” the younger of the two cries out. “You sit here, lie across the floor, and I’ll crawl to you.” And in a moment, there is a roar followed by a scream.
“I am caught, I am being pulled under, there’s no saving me.” The girls’ cries are filled not with terror or sadness but with ecstasy, pure delight.
She takes a deep breath, tries to calm down, tells herself there’s time before the water gets too close, before it sinks down into the earth, undermines the ground beneath them, swallows everything up in one satisfied gulp. But before she can stop herself, she is pounding on the door to the room the two girls share.
The girls go quiet, but she can’t help herself. She is shouting, telling them it’s much too late for screaming or laughing or playing of any sort, crying out that the time for all of that is over, and all that is left for them to do now is go to sleep, even though it is early still, even though she must still cook their dinner and watch them eat the fish she prepared, urging them with each bite to take care not to swallow any bones.
My father dies in the morning
& a candy jar
in the middle of the house
wants also to be empty
objects in our living room
float like hot flies,
blue couches clutch the ceiling
& the coffee table whispers into the wall
The people, the fallen people,
the loved ones, my loved ones
sitting in the patio
we still laugh at the joke
about the giraffe.
We may cry in our fluorescent rooms,
when no one is looking.
We may be strong, we may, we may
but first we will tear our own
skin from our own skin
first can we go find
the other side where he went
find that place is not empty too.
As part of The Florida Review and Aquifer: TFR Online’s celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month and Latinx contributors, we are featuring the work of multi-media artist, theorist, and historian Michael Betancourt. We will feature one video by Betancourt every week until October 15th, starting today with The Kodak Moment. Betancourt’s work will also be featured in the upcoming fall print issue of The Florida Review.
The silent film actress Mae Murray, known as the “girl with bee-stung lips,” appears in fancy dress, pouting and flirting with the audience. Hers is an archetypal image of white feminine beauty from the start of the twentieth century, a form that was already old when the source film was shot in 1922, here glitched and fragmented—yet remaining coherently recognizable throughout this movie. The music is from a vintage 1920 recording of inventor, visual music pioneer, and symphony piano soloist Mary Hallock-Greenewalt playing Chopin’s Nocturne in G Major.
A long car trip to the desert in the outskirts of Juarez. A Tecate in a coozie between my dad’s legs and my mom’s arm outstretched, her hand caressing his neck.
Loud Mexican music plays on the car radio, either Pedro Infante or Luis Miguel. Depends on their mood.
My brother and I look out the window at the cotton fields and abandoned farmhouses.
My dad turns on to an unpaved road and keeps driving. Dirt hits our face in the back seat.
The car stops. The dust settles and reveals we are on the edge of a mesa. He gets out of the car and we follow.
As far as the eye can see: coarse sand, spirited tumbleweeds, a sunset like an erupting volcano.
My dad takes one last sip of beer and looks down at me. With one swift move, he launches the bottle into the virgin desert.
“Don’t litter, kids,” he says dryly.
I roll my eyes, and he erupts in laughter, loud and piercing in the open space.
It was the decade AquaNet was eating away the ozone layer and I, an impressionable pre-teen, had been very vocal about recycling. I thought he hadn’t been listening.
“Vamonos,” he says but I stand on the precipice a bit longer, the humiliation cementing itself into my consciousness.
In the car, he snaps open a fresh bottle of beer and my mom resumes her pose in the passenger side, playing with his hair. The drive back home is darker. Not even Luis Miguel can break the silence.
Beth Ann Fennelly was born in New Jersey and grew up in Illinois, but has become a Southern transplant and is now the Poet Laureate of Mississippi, as well as teaching at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. She is the author of six books and recipient of numerous awards. Her three collections of poetry are: Unmentionables: Poems (W. W. Norton, 2008), Tender Hooks (W. W. Nortion, 2004), and Open House: Poems (Zoo Press, 2002). More recently, she has focused her work in prose. She published Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother (W. W. Norton, 2006), then co-authored the novel The Tilted World (Harper Collins, 2013) with her husband, Tom Franklin. Most recently, she published Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (W. W. Norton, 2017).
We caught up with Beth Ann Fennelly at the Miami Book Fair in 2017 shortly after Heating & Cooling came out. Just this week, Heating & Cooling has been released in paperback, and so it’s a good time for us to finally get this interview published.
Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:
I want to start with question about the wider context of your evolution as a writer. I’ve worked with a number of people over the past year—Brenda Miller and her co-author, Lee Gulyas, and Monica McFawn and Darrell Nicholson—who have been writing together. They’ve talked about how much they enjoy the co-authoring process, although I’m sure it has its challenges as well. I think this is a little bit new. It’s not that people haven’t done it before, but it’s something that people are really paying attention to now. And I guess I wanted to ask about you and Tom Franklin co-authoring your previous book The Tilted World. I also want to ask about how you started off as a poet. Can you describe that evolution from writing primarily poetry to adding work in prose, and then doing a co-authored project. How did all of that happen?
Beth Ann Fennelly:
It seems that every writing project I’ve taken on is never with foresight or part of a career strategy.
[laughter]
Everything is an accident and serendipity. I thought I would only be a poet—that’s really all I ever wanted because I think it’s such a beautiful art form. At first, I accidentally wrote a non-fiction book called Great with Child. That was a collection of letters that I didn’t write thinking they would be collected into a book. And so that was happy and lucky.
Then I wrote another book of poems. Then the novel with Tommy came about in just this bizarre way. We had been thinking a lot about the flood of 1927 after Katrina happened, and how if that story hadn’t been written out of history maybe Katrina would’ve been handled differently. That’s the problem when things get written out of history—we can’t learn from them. We thought this was a big Southern story that needed to be told. We ended up writing a short story about it—really as a lark, without thinking too much about it, except then it got reprinted in Best American Mysteries and a couple of other big anthologies. And Tommy’s editor called up and said, “You didn’t tell me about this story.” And Tommy said, “Well, what’s to tell?” And the agent said, “It’s your next novel.”
Due to that, we suddenly found ourselves writing a novel, although it might have happened anyway because these characters were still in my head after the short story. The research I had done for us to write the short story was really compelling to me, and I was thinking how much more there was. So, we wrote the novel, and then after that, there was a period where I felt I wasn’t writing. I wanted to write another novel, actually. But I was going through this long, slightly terrifying period of “not writing.” I kept saying to Tommy, “I’m not writing. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Every morning, I’d get my notebook and write down a couple of weird, little thoughts, and nothing was adding up to something. I would write about a little conversation I’d heard or a little memory. I’d been doing that for a long time when one morning I thought how excited I was to get back to my desk. I recognized the feeling of writing before I recognized the product because that feeling, that excitement is how I feel when the writing’s going well. That morning, I went back and started paging through my notebook of all these random little bits of conversations and memories that I kept waiting to add up to something.
For the first time, I thought, “What if I stop waiting for it to add up to something? What if it is something, just a really small something?” And then I thought of the term ‘micro-memoirs’, and in a weird way coming up with the term freed me to complete the project. None of this was done with great forethought. And in fact, if I were the type of person who had forethought, I wouldn’t have done any of this, because it’s not really what one wants from one’s career, in a way. Because your publicist wants to be able to say, “Oh, she writes sonnets about her cat.” The expectation is that you just do the one thing.
TFR:
Right, right, very specific.
Fennelly:
Yeah. And so just to confuse things, now I’m the Poet Laureate of Mississippi, and I haven’t written a poem in three years. [laughter] Oh no.
TFR:
That’s hilarious.
Fennelly:
I know.
TFR:
That’s so funny. But you will. Do you doubt it?
Fennelly:
No, not really. For now, I’m just in love with the sentence, and I used to be in love with the line. I’m just waiting for the cycle to come back around to that.
TFR:
One of the things I am also curious about is your embrace of Mississippi. You mentioned how The Tilted World was a Southern story that needed to be told. It’s often difficult for those who are raised and educated in other regions, as you have been, to find a happy home in the deep South. And yet you seem to have done it and have embraced it as an identity. And so how has that happened for you as a person and a writer? I grew up in the South, in Tennessee. I was gone for a long time, and then when I got the job in Orlando at UCF, I had friends who wouldn’t speak to me. They were like, “You’re going back to the South? How can you do that?” And I was like, “Well, it’s a great job where I get to teach creative writing all the time and no composition.” [chuckle] There were those kinds of things. But there’s so often that attitude of hostility from people who don’t know the South. I just wonder if there was a transition for you, if it was difficult for you, or if you’re just the kind of person who embraces where you are.
Fennelly:
I grew up, as you say, in the Midwest. And the Midwest landscape and architecture, I understood intellectually why they were beautiful, or why I was supposed to find them beautiful. But when I moved to the South for the first time—for graduate school at the University of Arkansas in 1994—I just loved it. It seemed to suit my personality in a weird way.
I come from an Irish background, and there’s a lot I love about being Irish that also seems to be very strong in the South. I love storytelling, I love music. I like emphasis on family. All those things are interesting to me. But there is the bigger question of how a place becomes a home or how we can choose a home, and I also think there’s an element of mystery to it, because the South shouldn’t have felt like home.
But it did. I met my husband the first day of graduate school. And now we have three children with Mississippi drawls. And we’ve bought five plots in the cemetery next to Faulkner.
TFR:
Has it ever been hard for you? Has there ever been a moment where you thought, “Ooh. Who are these people?”
Fennelly:
No, but I do obviously struggle with a lot of the things in the South.
Part of me accepting the role of Southerner—which wasn’t something I claimed for myself, but something people eventually honored me with—part of it is also remaining clear-eyed about the problems in the South. And in Oxford, Mississippi, it was just fifty years ago that James Meredith integrated the school. And there’s still a bullet hole where people were shooting during riots. So, it is something I think about a lot. What does it mean to be from this region and embrace this region, and yet just be determined to be part of the people who are working to change it for the better?
TFR:
That makes great sense.
Heating & Cooling is a tiny book that is nonetheless deeply rich, I found, and certainly poetic. You can definitely see your background as a poet. What do you see as the connection between poetry and memoir in this book, and more generally?
Fennelly:
When I came up with the term ‘micro-memoir’ and started thinking, “Okay, look, what are these things I’m writing?” what I realized was I wanted to take the things I loved most from the different genres. From poetry, what I love is that extreme compression and abbreviation and that lyrical explosion of the release. And from fiction, I love narrative tension. I love a page-turner quality. I like the storytelling. I like beginnings, middles, and ends. And from nonfiction, I love truth-telling. I love facts. And right now, because we are in an era of alternative facts, and truth is so malleable to some, I found my own insistence on the facts as maybe a weird reaction to that. My facts are just coming from my life, but—after spending four years writing a novel in the heads of characters—my own life seemed interesting to me again.
TFR:
One of my favorite qualities of this book and your work as a whole is how humane it is. There’s an appealing humility but without obsequiousness, if you know what I mean. There’s humor balanced with poignancy. Reading Beth Ann Fennelly is like reading someone you would really like to know.
Fennelly:
Oh, how nice.
TFR:
I just really feel that way. I think people can over-claim that they know you when they read a book. We all know that when you write, it’s not all of us that’s in the . . .
Fennelly:
I do that sometimes. I read a book and feel like I know the author.
TFR:
Sometimes, that can be really obnoxious. [laughter] I don’t mean to be weird about it, but I just think that over the years, having read a variety of your work, I feel like there’s a friendly quality. How do you feel like you achieve the balance between different tonalities that you work with? And how does that come out of your approach to drafting and revising? You’ve talked about that a little bit already with this book in particular.
Fennelly:
I love that you found it a humane book—that’s really flattering to me. I would say one of the things I wanted was for it to be the me-est book possible, and to bring in all the parts of me, and even the ugly parts. There are some pieces in here where I don’t really look all that kind or maybe even sane. But I wanted the full range of human emotions, particularly my human emotions. I didn’t want to keep anything out even if it was slightly salacious or unsavory. Part of that for me is not keeping humor out, too, which is something that I did when I was younger. As I’ve grown older, I’ve become more confident in my own voice. When I was younger, I wanted to be taken seriously. And I looked around and what are the big boys doing? Well, they’re writing poems about Greek myths. So, by God, here’s my Perseus poem. Take this. Ugh.
[laughter]
As I got older, I began to realize that what I want from a book is what I want from a friend, someone who accepts all of me. I began to realize that parts of the way I look at the world were not coming into my work. I think so much about being a human is funny. I think being a mom is funny. I think being middle-aged is funny. I think being in a long marriage is funny. What if I just stopped keeping that part out? All of these micro-memoirs are just ways of relaxing and knowing who I am and being less worried about being judged. I was taught to be a good girl. I was brought up Irish Catholic. It was pretty Victorian in some ways. And part of this book is about being less scared of someone thinking that I’m not being ladylike.
TFR:
I just laughed my head off when you were talking about having a large bladder. And I was like, “Yeah, me too.”
Fennelly:
That’s so funny. [laughter]
TFR:
But I also found more generally that I kept thinking, “Yes, me too.”
I loved a lot of the different ways that you talked about the body in the book. I don’t know how consciously you developed that as a theme, but there were some very poignant places, and there were some very funny places. I thought one of the resonances of this book was that it’s such a little book, but the complexity of the body that you depict in it was so profound. How consciously, when you were finally putting it together as a collection of pieces, did you think about those different, particular elements, but especially that body element?
Fennelly:
That’s a good question. It was hard to put the book together because they’re all stories from my life that are true with people that I know. I have myself as a child, an adolescent, and adult. I have all my major roles. I’m in there as a wife, and a mother, and a teacher, and a writer, and a human. And some of the pieces are short, and some are longer. When I first tried to put the book together, there was almost a problem of too-muchness. And I originally thought the book was gonna be a hundred pieces, because I know a couple of books that do a hundred short pieces, and I love them. But it just ended up seeming almost too exuberant.
My editor is the one who said I should cut it. She said, “Not because any of the pieces are weaker, but you need to strengthen the themes.” That inspired me to started thinking like, “Okay, this person comes in in more than one piece.” Or, “This role I have is in more than one piece,” and kind of cutting the outliers. It was a little challenging to figure out how to narrow it down. But narrowing it down did strengthen the themes. And I am really interested in the body, particularly the female body, and got that way through becoming a mother, actually, and writing about my body for the first time when it started to go south.
[laughter]
TFR:
We take it for granted. And then . . .
Fennelly:
Yes. Pregnancy and childbirth and all that made me inhabit my body and be intellectually engaged with walking around in a body in a way I hadn’t really noticed when I was younger, when inhabiting it was more thoughtless.
TFR:
I think many women writers, especially poets and nonfiction writers, are reaching out into this social moment that we’re having. With the loss of Hillary Clinton last year and the more recent revelations about sexual assault, it feels very much to me like women are saying, “We’re done putting up with this.” I thought that you also sometimes strike a feminist note, for example when you note that someone uses “pussy” as a synonym for weak.
Do you have advice for other writers who desire to address social issues without writing propaganda? How do you manage to bring such a light touch to that process?
Fennelly:
That’s interesting because I don’t think of myself as a political poet or a political writer, and I wanted to be when I was younger, and I failed. When I tried to write political stuff, it came out a little screechy.
TFR:
Pedantic, sure.
Fennelly:
What I realized is my best ideas don’t come out as argument—they come out as metaphor or narrative. In the narrative or in the metaphor, the politics sneak on through sometimes. I’ve always been someone who felt things strongly, but I would’ve been a terrible lawyer. I don’t have the ability to make that kind of logical argument. But the piece that you just referred to—it’s almost like the metaphor for calling a someone a pussy instead of a weak thing, was almost like a literary criticism. That’s a bad metaphor. The reason, of course, is clear in that piece, I think.
There’s another piece in the end of the book, “Salvage,” about my father-in-law who passed away, who I loved so much, who was a mechanic, and he worked so hard his whole life. And then in the end, he had to have his teeth pulled, and he didn’t have insurance to get new teeth. For me, what that piece is secretly about is my rage over unaffordable healthcare. How is it possible to be such a hardworking and dignified man working with his hands all day long, and at the end of his life, be abandoned? You know?
TFR:
Right, right.
Fennelly:
The politics is there, but kind of through the side door.
TFR:
How did you structure this book? You talked about having to pare it down from a hundred pieces. One of the things I noticed, of course, was that you have the three appearances of married love throughout the piece.
Fennelly:
Ultimately, I just tried to make sure I didn’t have two similar tones immediately together, or two pieces the same size. Because I wanted a lot of tonal variation, and that’s something that’s fun to do in short pieces. If you’re writing a novel, whether it’s literary or comedic or thriller, you can have small tonal variations. But with these short pieces, you could have one piece that’s funny, and then the next piece is super sad, and the next piece is bitchy, and the next piece is wry or nostalgic. And every piece can be its own thing, and the next piece can be completely different.
I wanted to move really rapidly through the emotions and to give the reader the thing that I feel like is a pleasure, where your heart is expanded a little bit through reading. And I tried to make sure I spaced the one-sentence ones throughout the book. And the married love sequence, I spaced that throughout the book. That was the kind of thing that guided me. But every time I cut a piece, it was like Jenga because I had to re-order the whole thing. It was so complicated.
TFR:
What is relationship between domesticity and art for you?
Fennelly:
My focus on domesticity here is in reaction to writing a very high stakes, deeply researched, historical novel [The Tilted World] where, if it failed, it would’ve been really bad for our marriage, and our egos, and our kids. After looking through a character’s eyes for so long, I started looking at my own life, and instead of doing research, just working with memory, which is really fascinating to me anyway. I think in a way when I was growing up, female novels were supposed to be centered in the domestic in a way that really was reductive. On the other hand, I’ve always thought that’s where so much of our important work as humans is coming from. It’s a pretty strange decision to say, “Well, this is a domestic novel,” and have that be a pejorative term. And so actually finding everything . . . love, and terror, and misery, and humor . . . finding everything that can come out of the domestic was really fun.
Newly conscious in Union City,
that so-Jersey place with all-Spanish signage
my parents grew up in and around.
We drive by a huge blue-logoed highwayside gym
that used to be a Toys R Us.
My brother and I often begged to go
when we still lived nearby. That spot
housed all our dreams.
Here my eyes clock
the person next to me’s left knee against my right one,
its tenderness
a babe
of our mutual rest.
How rare to feel cozy with a man neither friend nor fuck,
face half-viewable, stubbly, his skin a few shades lighter
than mine, a small, thick left hoop earring
I think is diamond.
I imagine his mother wears
or wore similar ones,
that he respects women.
I imagine we are two brown queers sharing this row.
How we might otherwise have met awake
at Papi Juice
Bubble T or some other
Brooklyn brown queer party.
Man and his are, of course, projections
much huger than the rest;
also can’t recall if I saw them wearing two earrings
when they first sat beside me in DC,
or which ear is the gay ear. Still asleep, their legs shift away
and our babe slips down the gap.
She doesn’t know why she gets into the car, but she knows why she’s alone. Jonas broke up with her in an email: On the things that matter, the things that really count, we don’t see eye-to-eye. He’d switched the font to Lucida Handwriting, blue, as if to soften the blow. She’d seen it coming. They’d argued about evolution at the foot of the Tower of the Americas. He pointed at a duck and asked in what universe does something whittle down to that?
One with a sense of humor, she said, but he didn’t laugh.
Darwin was racist, Juliana, he snapped. Darwin said terrible things about black people. Did they teach you that in AP Biology?
Did they teach you that at Jesus Camp? she’d retorted, but only when he’d begun to walk away. He couldn’t hear her over the children screaming in the dry fountain. San Antonio was in drought, like always, so the waterfalls modeled on Mayan temples held no water. Kids in slip-on sneakers raced from bottom to top and down again. She was sure their game would end in bloody mouths, broken teeth, but no one fell.
She knows why she boarded a southbound bus after school. She wanted to go downtown. Her bills were too wrinkled for the token machine, but the driver waved her through with a nod. There were no other students on the bus, not even after the Trinity stop, just a few unsmiling women who glared at the hem of her tartan kilt but wouldn’t meet her eyes. She sat by the window near the back, tucking her skirt beneath her legs so her thighs wouldn’t stick to the vinyl, and watched the sidewalks for someone she knew. Down the North St. Mary’s strip, where bars and clubs beckon the underage. Not yet dark, no one drinking. Day drunks stick to the River Walk. There she’d once witnessed a pink-faced man in a balloon hat relieve himself into the brown current on a Tuesday morning, that summer she served breakfast and lunch at an Italian restaurant where every dish was pre-prepared, microwaved.
This is why I keep you on breakfast, Julibaby, the manager had said, nudging her. There’s a lot more of those groserias at dinner.
A lot more tips, too, she’d considered saying, but she didn’t want him to think she was a complainer. She’d barely earned enough to pay for the tricolor tie he insisted she wear in the 100-degree heat.
She didn’t go downtown to get drunk. No: she is terrified of drunkenness, thinks of it as roving hands and burst capillaries, a sickness you choose. A disease of weak will, the way her mother speaks of it, vergüenza; they’re better off without her father. So Juliana doesn’t drink, not really. She’d tried. The girls said it would mellow her, but at a party with the Central Catholic boys she’d panicked after two Mike’s Hard Lemonades and called her mom to come pick her up.
I am out of control, she told herself as she waited in the front yard. I am out of control. It felt good to say it, even if she knew it wasn’t true.
I didn’t raise you like this, her mother said in the car. Sneaking around. If you need to sneak around you’re ashamed of your life and who are you then, Juli?
I’m the virgin who gets scared and calls her mom, she thought. I’m Shirley Temple. She giggled. Her mother stiffened behind the wheel.
She got off the bus at a downtown plaza, pushing against the current of tourists toward the river. She was numb, blind to the designer chocolate shops and trinket stands and smear-faced kids begging their parents for food and air conditioning. Sweaty strangers but still she’d seen them all before, people set on remembering the Alamo, people who buy t-shirts and ice cream and indulge a history that makes them feel good. She was fixed on something Jonas said the night of their first date: I’m so glad you’re not like everyone else. She kept herself from asking how, letting his words swell in the silence like confession. He didn’t try to touch her, not then. He waited in his car until she’d closed and locked the front door of her house before he drove away. He waited until she was safe.
Dusk hit. The bald cypress trees along the river were mobbed with grackles, their clipped wails piercing the tourists’ din. Not their song, Jonas said—the slick brown-black birds were just trying to echo the downtown crowds. Their real call is much quieter, he once explained, less desperate. They sound almost like songbirds on their lonesome. He was homeschooled; he used words like lonesome. He had a small chip in his right front tooth. He was in a band, played guitar. She wanted to lick the calluses on his fingers until they were soft.
She doesn’t know why she gets in the car, but she knows why she took a pledge of abstinence for True Love Waits: Jonas asked. He came to Incarnate Word High School during assembly with homemade pamphlets and a promise ring on his finger and before a dusty green chalkboard she said yes to God, along with a handful of freshmen and Hilda Rios, who would probably remain a virgin the rest of her life, pledge or no. He wrote his number on her pamphlet, right next to a clip art vision of a smiling bride.
Call me if you want to talk about the promise we’ve made, he smiled.
I’ll be a born-again virgin if I can chill with him, some girl snickered after he left homeroom.
True Love Waits, but she didn’t have to. He invited her to bible study at his church that same week, offering to pick her up at her two-bedroom house on one of the sadder streets in Alta Vista and drive her all the way out to 1604, where box churches beamed search lights into the sky. On the drive she asked if he was paid to recruit virgins. She’d rehearsed the line a few times at home, hoping it struck the bohemian evangelical chord just so.
No, he laughed. It’s more of a volunteer gig. My calling, I guess.
Then, quick like he knew her next question: You’re the first recruit I’ve ever asked out.
He introduced her to his friends at bible study, boys with names like Chad and Tucker who tucked button-downs into belted jeans. Is it Joo-lee-anna or Hoo-lee-anna? one of them asked, and she blushed and shrugged: I respond to everything. Jonas pronounced it wrong but she hadn’t wanted to correct him. Their names sounded better together his way, anyway.
When she left the river, mounting the limestone steps toward the street, a crush of men in chino shorts cheered from a hot pink barge behind her. They lifted their beer mugs in approval; someone screamed nice skirt.
The girls at Incarnate were jealous of her, for once. They noticed her compulsively checking her email in the library between classes. Did you fuck him yet? they asked, poking her waist, laughing. Does he keep his ring on when he feels you up?
No, she snapped, but he does make me wear a crown of thorns. The girls laughed harder, impressed.
He didn’t touch her, not at first. They were never alone in a room. They spent afternoons in youth group in deep, circular discussions about holy desire, how true love is anchored first in faith. They sometimes brushed arms, sitting close enough for her to memorize his smell: Tide detergent and chew. A month before they held hands, six weeks before he kissed her in a dark theater. And then it was an urgent tumbling, a humming thrill that didn’t stop when he stopped (and always, he stopped). She reasoned it was okay, the wanting, because it felt pure. Like something she was created to do. Her body’s own glorious mystery.
Why are you doing this to me? he asked one night his hands in her hair his mouth on her ear.
She expected to find men on Commerce Street, men who bared gold teeth at her as they drove past, slow. Jonas asked about these cars once, early in their courtship: what’s the deal with y’all’s lowriders mang? He used a Southside accent when he asked questions like these. He asked more often those nights his tongue had been inside her mouth. He never waited for her answer. He never asked why she didn’t introduce him to her mother, either. Her house was off limits, he seemed to understand. He might have been relieved.
She didn’t tell her mother about him. She kept her grades up, still went to mass, was home, always, before the end of her mom’s shift. No need for questions.
Why are you doing this to me? he asked again and again breathing into the hollow of her collarbone why won’t you stop me?
Because I don’t want to, she wanted to say. Because you don’t want me to.
Instead she’d kiss his forehead and eyelids and pray he felt it too, the longing that followed her for hours after they touched. In mass, as she pushed the papery wafer against the back of her teeth, she’d close her eyes and meditate on the patch of hair beneath his lower lip. She’d come to crave her own faith, its private, solemn ritual. At Jonas’ church everything was hands in the air, flashing lights, the devoted weeping as they sang.
They’d meant to explore Mission San Jose the night he confronted her about ducks and evolution. She’d thought the majestic limestone church would please Jonas—he was a Texas history buff, could recite Davy Crockett’s monologue from the John Wayne movie on request—but the grounds closed at five o’clock.
How very Catholic, he sniped. Like the Lord operates from nine to five.
That’s not fair. Every church has operating hours.
Worship me from one to three, he sang. After seven, there’s no heaven.
His voice was thin. He couldn’t get it to tremble the right way.
Clever, she said. She reached for his hand but he shoved it in his pocket.
I guess it’s easier to break the rules when you have a million of them, he said. If you think about it, it’s like the Pope expects you to fail. Like he’s setting you up for it.
She didn’t know what to say. In the dead pause she remembered something a Taylor or a Travis had said to Jonas after bible study: How’s that spicy mission work coming along? You still a sucker for lost causes?
On Commerce Street she has a clear view of the Tower, watches its glowing glass elevator ferry diners to the revolving restaurant at the top. She’s never been; only tourists see the city from that height. They sip margaritas made from cheap mix and try to spot the Alamo, where men died for Texas, where their favorite myth was born.
She waits. She carries no purse, no phone. So when a man whistles at her from a cherry-red Camaro that sparkles like candy, she climbs into his passenger seat knowing people won’t find her if this stranger doesn’t want them to. She isn’t scared. It has to be irrevocable, what comes next.
The man talked a big game when she was on the sidewalk, some nonsense about her schoolgirl skirt, but he’s quiet when she enters the plush interior of his coupe.
What are you doing? he asks.
You said you had something to teach me.
He looks all around the car, everywhere but her face. He’s breathing hard. A drop of sweat glides down his jawline.
You don’t belong here, baby girl.
How do you know?
You’re a good girl. You don’t know what you’re doing.
True, she says. But I’ve got to learn sometime.
That’s not how it works, he says, but he lets the car roll forward without pressing the gas.
for Emmett Till
On September 23, 1955, less than a month after Emmett Till’s lynching,
his killers (who would later openly admit to the crime) were acquitted
by an all-white, all-male jury in Sumner, Mississippi. Those killers
died in 1980 and 1994 without ever serving a day of time.
Nonetheless, we can still convict them here.
i.
You don’t remember, except the most
Significant crickets,
Sway, clack, clack
Till was still in the high blue grasses along the Tallahatchie River
Along the Mississippi bullfrogs mark
The browning rust of bullets: drown out the night by organs of earth:
Groaning, moaning, under weight of blankets of glimmering worlds.
Tiller of men, women
waves from the swamps drown out scratching hands clank, clack of shovels
“Emmett Till did more than whistle at Carolyn Bryant”
Look: there is nothing not even mud to rub
into my eyes, into the ashes, among reeds and resurrections of night.
We float down the river, on principle,
toward hives of higher ground
The wastes devour him from Glendora Mississippi
to the Freedom Trail highway
Down in the dark water, under the dark trees
Like a spiritual homing
There is no double jeopardy in the swamp.
ii.
From Greenwood, MS, to Money, MS, signs travel
And I reach for the moon
Among the dark vines—
In the buffalo clovers, in the prairie fringed orchids,
Bleating from prairie chicken shrill
Asking heaven to bury the dead.
The dead never sleep.
They stare at small fires.
They stare in the miles of prairie and contemplate steel shells like embers
Gleaming in the moonlight.
At uninhabited grassland, the dead dance
And wait outside houses of horrendous men.
The dead are far off in the mountains.
The dead grow native tongues and cause men to commit suicide
Among shot up placards and sleepless nights, drinking,
And shiver in the bluegrass
Like stolen placards
Kidnapped in gunsmoke
With lutes of tallgrass.
From Heaven, tears of white women and cries of black boys,
The final preparations are made
In the hollows and big bison creeks.
The dead keep the culprits, their souls broken like body,
Ridden in damnation
He’s never gone.
iii.
heavy cotton gin fan tied
to the ten-year-old’s neck with barbed wire
floating down the dark church of the Tallahatchie River
Down in the dark water, under the dark trees
“Bye baby” and “Bye baby” outside the candy shop
Dragged delicately about
The black water skiff hulks and sandy shoals
In the Memphis night he, years later,
Would resurface
As not guilty, preening as a Meadowlark
Calling to be released in the tallgrass
In Ferguson, Missouri, hijacked
Outside a candy shop, “bye baby”
For Michael Brown, “I cant breathe” the air was too thick for Eric Garner,
The grappling hooks behind the gin mill
Could not even clasp the body
He’s gone.
“Bye baby,” the police are probing tonight,
For bodies of black children in the waters of suburbs
Outside, they won’t let me in,
A shiver in the tallgrass: Indian bluestem, Kentucky Bluegrass,
A marker rooted in justice against racism,
The sign vandalized
A white drunkard stares at the open casket,
They won’t let me in.
iv.
in cellars of haunted houses
no one talked about it
the cool dark green moss
subsumed the secrets
the diamond-backed watersnake
whips and dissolves a whisper of water
walter scott was stopped at a traffic light
no one heard the pops
the cellars of haunted houses
are like ancient cities of civilizations that crashed
built on brutality in Saint Paul, in Baltimore,
in McKinney, Texas,
in cellars of haunted houses,
whispers are drowned out by clank and crush of the cotton gin
like Eli Whitey’s patent, or Fones McCarthy’s invention
fallen on big heaps of black men’s backs
no one talked about it
v.
she recants
sheriff promises those things hunted down
nothing he ever did
could justify the blood of Emmett Till
only after nightfall, boys lie awake
wondering, wondering
The game show host announces the doors to our cultura are
language and food las puertas
son lenguaje y comida
y no tengo las llaves brain locked down when anyone speaks
Spanish too suddenly
In Puerto Rico, I want to crack myself open
an inside-out coconut, let español spill over my beloved island
where I learned to eat my plantains sweet
San Juan, Sabana Grande are where I see my face reflected back at me
in each shop, la playa, bars
near-perfect replica of my mother’s
In Panamá, when she was a child, our familia called her fea—
ugly girl, with our afroboricua smile
that is the mouth I want to know, the Spanish I stretch lips to reach
try
my friends urge
no sé la palabra para try but maybe
my mother kept the keys from me so each blade-
shaped word
could not cut through
forged me as Latina Jeanne D’Arc
her naked back a constellation of stab wounds
On Sundays when the children’s bodies are dragged from the Rio
Grande
they are reborn
yucca flowers, baptized in cool blue morning broken
by
dolor
is to run through the fence, barbed
wire laced in your gut,
no tetanus shot to back you up. As the doctor re-inoculates
me, decade since my last shot in the arm
raw with hubris, one more defense
against
desert borders,
bare feet
my choice
When I ask, how do I ready this womb to deliver another,
she says, you know this means you can’t go home
Si, I reply, lo sé,
I know,
there is not enough Spanish in this poem.
If my torso is the transfomer toppled in Coamo by la tormenta
que comenzo todas las tormentas, pole splinters, sundered
lines wrapped around my neck, then my heart is the machete
mi hermano takes to the debris, hacks his way to power
once more. If my mouth is the cage closed on our stolen hijos
e hijas from El Paso to New York, then my tongue is the machete
struck to stone for one spark to ignite the final fire. If my feet
are the desert floor jagged with rock shards and sand scorch,
then my legs are the machete that have held mi madre up since San
Salvador, breaks through brush, past helicopter-light hunt.
If my arms are the closed gate between mi hermana and refuge, then
my hands are the machete, handle bashing down the lock.
This is how I bear this body forward, weapon honed by the white
man since I was una niña pequeña and now they will pay
homage to my machete heart, corazón de machete, your crimson
insurgent beats, those booted steps, you do not bleed, you burn—
your only stillness the song between, breath before the slash,
then the salvo, la fuerza, when they broke through the front door,
you were already gone.
I—Orchidaceae
It was the way he tended to the orchids that let me know papi still held love inside him. The way he gently held thin branches between thumb and index finger, the way he cusped newly bloomed flowers in the palm of his hand, how he clipped slowly and with care, the fear of irreparable damage plain in his eyes. It’s the only thing he did with care anymore. Nothing else in life seemed to be permanent or irreparable.
II—Bulbophyllum
I tried not to let myself cry in front of him, a difficult task for one as young as I was. Children crave company when in misery. Wanting an audience while you cry seems to be something we just eventually outgrow. The few times I couldn’t help crying in his presence, his face went sharp, all lines and angles, and he said the same thing, “A llorar pa’l cuarto,” Go cry in your room. This must have been the seed which turned into the weeds that still hold me in solitude whenever I’m feeling blue.
At least the man practiced what he preached. There was a night during those days right after it happened in which I stumbled out of bed, my small bladder tight and bursting, only to hear muffled whimpers and moans coming from his room. What a sad, terrible sound that was.
III—Epidendrum
Papi’s garden was all colors, bright and blinding; all scents, flamboyant and proud; all life, all hope. Papi’s garden was everything he was not.
IV—Dendrobium
The house on my walk to school. The house, as papi and I referred to it. As if the “the” had some kind of accent mark. Thé house with the garden, with the Rotchschild’s orchids and the Saffron crocus. Papi always believed they had a Shenzhen Nongke orchid hidden in there somewhere, a plant so expensive he assured me multiple times was worth more than our house. He could not afford any of the plants in that garden because keeping me around wasn’t cheap. He looked at those flowers with longing. I looked at them with disdain.
V—Terrestrial Pulmonate Gastropod Molluscs or Papi’s Tiny Nemesis
It frightened me how easily he stepped on snails, how hard he stomped on them, how he swiveled on his heel from side to side, an act of dominance—unnecessary and cruel, seeing that you could crush a snail with the palm of your hand. Once, I suggested moving the snails, collecting and transferring them somewhere else, and in an attempt to sound cunning—hard, maybe—I even suggested transferring them to our neighbor’s backyard. Papi didn’t like our neighbor, he said the neighbor hugged his kids too much, that he was a little too nice, if you know what I mean. I never knew what he meant, but I would always nod silently, trying to imagine what it would feel like to be hugged too much. Surprisingly, he agreed to my plan, he said, “Vamos, tratémoslo,” Let’s try it out.
It was the hardest I’d ever worked in the garden. I wanted to collect and save as many snails as I could and as quickly as possible. I feared papi would change his mind. I plucked snails like grapes from the vine, one by one, delicately and efficiently. After about an hour or two my hands were caked in mud, my face brown—browner than usual—with dirt. I was proud of the haul. I felt like a hero.
If you are an adult, as I am now, you can see where this is all going, you—same as I—have experienced enough, seen enough in life to know that people don’t change just like that, that parents are sometimes harder than they need to be, even when they believe they mean well, when they believe they are teaching lessons.
I cried myself to sleep that night.
VI—Pleurothallis
Some days I wished I was a snail, able to disappear within myself at any moment. Papi would have hated knowing that.
VII—An orchid with no light will grow, but not bloom.
Maybe it was the snail thing, how I couldn’t stop thinking about how easily they cracked and popped beneath my feet, how the sound lingered in my head like a song of death. Maybe it was the fact that mom and I used to pick out snails from that very garden and race them.
I pulled those orchids from the ground like they were bad weeds. I pulled hard, with determination. Some of them I pulled using both hands, the way I had to pull on the lawnmower’s chord to get it started. I ruined the orchids, but only the orchids, because we both knew those were the ones my mother loved the most.
When I was done I ran straight to my room. I got in bed as I was, covered in dirt and mud, covered in sweat and an overwhelming pain my young body had never felt before. A llorar pa’l cuarto.
This fall, The Florida Review and Aquifer: TFR Online celebrate Latinx / Latina / Latino writers. Starting September 15, and running through October 15, we will be featuring numerous Latinx authors in Aquifer, and later this fall we will include a special section in 42.2 of the print Florida Review as well.
Starting with issue 40.2, we have focused a special section of each fall print Florida Review on an issue of social relevance. After the Pulse tragedy in 2016, many literary magazines and other media outlets focused attention on the issue, and we felt that we needed to offer a closer-to-home perspective to that national dialog. We featured six pieces of writing dedicated to the impact of the event.
After that special feature, we had the opportunity to interview distinguished author Ana Castillo about her book Black Dove, a memoir partly about her son being incarcerated for theft. Between Castillo’s work, a plenitude of submissions from prisoners and former prisoners across the country, and submissions by family and friends of prisoners, a themed section for Fall 2017 (41.2) emerged. The number of people being incarcerated in the US is an important social issue, and we were able to highlight it in seven writers’ moving literary responses.
This year, in Aquifer‘s second year, we decided to connect online and print themes and to continue to raise awareness of social issues. At The Florida Review and Aquifer, we are acutely aware of the VIDA count, which documents discrimination against women in the publishing world and sometimes also focuses on writers of color. At The Florida Review and Aquifer, we are dedicated to being part of the solution to gender and racial inequity.
Nicole Oquendo, special Latinx feature editor, notes, “As editors, we have a responsibility to make time to highlight a diverse range of voices.” As our former creative nonfiction editor, Nicole agreed to come back and help put together this celebration of Latinx authors, especially early and mid-career writers who deserve more recognition.
“There is so much exciting new work going on, and Latinx writers are adding to both the Florida and the national literary scene,” comments editor-in-chief Lisa Roney.
This is the fiftieth anniversary of Hispanic Heritage Month, and we are thrilled that this will be our first Aquifer special feature. Between the Aquifer feature this month and the authors included in 42.2 later this fall, we will have the privilege of sharing the work of more than forty Latinx / Latina/ Latino writers and several artists.
Our Pool is about the space in-between. Digitizing my family’s VHS collection of home movies was an experience I don’t think I could forget (an experience ironically filled with moments I didn’t remember). Some of the tapes featured family members I had never met or only met once or twice. Others, like this short clip of my mother, father, and siblings in my grandparent’s pool, affectionately labeled “Our Pool,” brought back a swell of memories. One part haunting, another exhilarating; nostalgia meets revelation in the space between screen and memory: boy and girl: self and family.
