Category: Aquifer

A Warning

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.

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Levitations

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.

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The Kodak Moment

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.

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Sunday

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.

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Interview: Beth Ann Fennelly

Cover of Beth Ann Fennelly's Heating & Cooling     Cover of Beth Ann Fennelly & Tom Franklin's The Tilted World     Cover of Beth Ann Fennelly's Unmentionables.

Cover of Beth Ann Fennelly's Great with Child.   Cover of Beth Ann Fennelly's Tender Hooks.   Cover of Beth Ann Fennelly's Open House.

 

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.

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On the Megabus from DC back to New York, 7:00AM

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.

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Only Tourists Remember the Alamo

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.

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The Body Riddled with Bullets: A Five-Part Pastoral

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

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Three Poems on the Anniversary of Hurricane Maria

The Room I Cannot Enter

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

 

 

No Matter Where I Go, I Carry You With Me

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.

 

 

Ode To My Latina Machete Heart

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.

 

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Orchidaceae

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.

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