Category: Literary Features

King Speaking

 

“King Speaking” is a sequence excerpted from the latter half of a book-length erasure, Her Read, forthcoming from Texas Review Press in 2021. Her Read reconceives the entirety of The Meaning of Art (Faber & Faber, 1931), a highly regarded exploration of art from prehistory to the modern era by British art and cultural critic Herbert Read. Though the maternal body appears with frequency, zero womxn artists are included in the early editions of this text. In 1951, Barbara Hepworth becomes the sole female artist to be admitted.

 

I began this makeover summer of 2016, in that pre-election heat, when rage at the latest iterations of hate on the American political stage, in conjunction with erasures playing out in my own life, made other writing seem impossible. From the voice of the male critic surveying male bodies of work, I began excavating a first-person lyric, the imagined voice(s) of womxn artists.

 

The concept of “mastery” appears with frequency over the course of the book, issues of dominion—that is to say—control—over a medium of expression, over other humans, and of course, over the Earth. One may well ask, what is art but a pronunciation of mastery? One may ask, must it always be?

 

Though I call this erasure, collage is a more accurate descriptor of this late excerpt. The surgical reconstruction contrasts cruder, monochromatic pages early in the text—used canvases treated only with correction fluid. As the book advances, the speaker gains agency over the text, revising the rules to serve to her fluencies. One rule is not broken: all language excavated and redeployed in this text can be harvested from a single copy of Read’s seminal text.

 

Materials:  source text, correction fluid, archival inks, bookbinders glue, florist tissue, window shades, general purpose thread, embroidery floss.

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Long Marriage (Parable of the Skull)

Over years we lifted it sometimes
from its cardboard box, studying

 

the fifty teeth and gazing into the open
eye sockets, this possum skull we found

 

in our sixth year, half-buried in the dirt
behind the rental house. For decades, then,

 

we moved it everywhere we went,
and always it lay quietly, as patient as dirt,

 

and only now and then did I imagine it
dreaming that skin formed once more around

 

its body—the moon face and moon tail—
so it might waddle again along the river.

 

 

This poem was originally published in The Florida Review (43.2, Fall 2019) and was a runner-up in the Humboldt Poetry Prize.

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Notes on Pet Monkeys and How to Manage Them

I.     CAGE ITEMS

 

This box should be fairly heavy. The door
never needs opened or undone. Bend the rim
into a square. Little danger to your
self—the room to be afforded him.

A looking glass hung up by a small chain—
your pet’s vanity exceeds belief. A
flimsily made affair is soon bitten
to pieces. Body of a cage. Many a
good monkey is killed by swallowing
fragments of glass. Rub on a coat of
maroon. A little ornamental topping.
Or Venetian Red, most suitable of
colors for a cage. All that remains
is to procure your monkey and put him in.

 

II.     CLASSIFICATION

 

From the time my fingers were big enough
to manufacture fly-cages with hollowed
cork and pins—all other lines of
fancy well threshed out—Simians have held

 

great fascination. The schoolboy’s definition
is “the plural of monk.” Or humonculous.
Much is lacking in what might have been
told. I cannot pin. Great naturalists

 

have labored to show a relationship.
I cannot pin my credibility.
Below the average human idiot’s,
the head of a chimpanzee. I am drifting.

 

What might have been. A fertile source of
drollery. My fingers were big enough.

 

III.     AILMENTS

 

Disease—Symptoms of Indisposition—

Quinsy—Good Riddance—a small apple

hollowed out—Toothache—Headache—treat him

as you would a child—Useful Article—

 

as you would—Broken Limbs—a human
being—Rheumatism—Rupture—Risk of

Being Bitten—first he should be en-
veloped—Treatment—in a bag—Costive-

 

ness—Biliousness—Monkeys Eating Their
Own Tails—a ready sale is better than
the nuisance—Excrement—the “Kill or Cure”
Treatment—treat him as you would a human

 

being—Simple Remedies—a small apple hollowed

out and plugged again is greedily devoured

 

IV.     CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS

 

Savagely grabbed, the hand that has fed and
petted him all along. The very moment
novelty is lost, sit and write off an
advertisement to Exchange and Mart,

 

Bazaar. I haven’t always had the heart.
A passing menagerie generally

has a vacant cage. With an iron bar
a sharp and heavy blow. An exceedingly

 

human-like affair. As if we all of us
come at last to this. In skinning him
yourself you’ll find his hide fairly tough.
Put him in a natural posture. A bit

 

of dried moss, artificial leaf you might
purchase at the milliners. Keep him in full light.

 

 

 

The source material for these pieces is Notes on Pet Monkeys and How to Manage Them, Arthur Patterson’s 1888 handbook, which was published in response to the colonialist British fashion of adopting exotic animals without any idea of how to properly provide care for them. These poems erase and rearrange the text into sonnet form. The poems were originally published in The Florida Review (43.2, Fall 2019) and were the winner of the Humboldt Poetry Prize.

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Freebirds

My mother calls to tell me she cannot get on the plane. She has had a premonition.

 

“You’re going to crash?” I sit upright in bed, sheet clutched to my chest. When she says stuff like this, my skin gets crawly.

 

“Not exactly a premonition.” She sighs. “I can’t say what will happen. A foreboding. Emmy, I’m not thinking straight. I can’t zip up my suitcase. And I wanted to get out of here so badly.”

 

“Are you sure it’s the plane?” I look to my left where the baby is sleeping in her bassinet. I look to the right where my husband is sleeping in our bed. “Could you be foreboding something else?” I say as I tiptoe out of the room, which is not actually a room. We put up a wall in the studio after the baby was born.

 

No, says my mother, she’s sure it’s the plane, and of course, I could try to reason with her. I could tell her to go ahead and pack that suitcase, get in a taxi, buy a tea and sit at the airport, see if the foreboding recedes. Until she’s actually on the plane, she has not committed to anything. Instead, I say, “I don’t know what to tell you.” Because really, what should I tell her to do? Get on the plane and then the plane crashes and then she’s gone and then it’s my fault? Because planes do crash. They do.

 

In the background, at my mother’s house, radio voices are murmuring. “I have to think,” she says. “I’ll call you back.”

 

—

 

As soon as I hang up the phone, the baby is up. By up, I mean that she’s screaming. She’s always screaming and we don’t know why. I don’t know why. My husband comes out of the bedroom and hands her to me. “I have to go,” he says.

 

“It’s six thirty in the morning.” I follow him into the bathroom. He’s a real estate broker, which means that he works on commission, which means that the more he works the more money he makes, at least in theory. I’m no longer sure I buy this direct correlation. He works seven days a week. Before we had a baby, this wasn’t a problem. But now we do have a baby.

 

I sit on the toilet, bouncing the baby in my lap, while my husband brushes his teeth. “My mother might not be coming,” I say.

 

He spits into the sink. “Is she sick?”

 

“Sick in the head!” I say. “You’d think she’d want to see Eva. Who wouldn’t want to spend time with this delightful creature?” I kiss the top of Eva’s head, which is covered in the silkiest hair, soft and ticklish on my lips. She smells like a baby, like white soap and milk. She likes to be bounced, likes the sound of the water and the echo of our voices in the tiny chamber of the bathroom. She and I spend a lot of time in this bathroom. On the rare occasions when she is content and awake, I adore her so much I want to stuff her whole hand in my mouth. Both hands at once.

 

My husband is sliding the stroller out of the way to get to the door when my mother calls me back. “I’m in line at security,” she says.

 

“What changed your mind?”

 

“I’m a fifty-four-year-old woman. I cannot live my life in fear.”

 

—

 

I spy her on my building’s doorstep, from four stories up. She is covered chin to foot in a camel-colored, fur-trimmed coat. Her bright blond hair spills over the collar. Since the divorce, she has made herself thin and sort of glamorous.

 

She is also late. More than two hours late. Thirty minutes ago she called from a taxi to say she was on her way but couldn’t talk. Before that, I was very worried. Fear gnawed my stomach from the inside out. I called the airline. The plane had landed safely, on time. So if something had happened, it had happened only to my mother. Baby in my arms, growing heavier by the minute, I paced the apartment. What had she been foreboding? A car accident? A fainting spell?

 

“I met the pilot,” she says, over coffee, at the cafe around the corner, Broadway and 100, where we have settled ourselves at a cozy table. The baby is asleep in her stroller and I am actually drinking my coffee, my guard down, more relaxed than I’ve felt in weeks. If I need to use the bathroom, my mother can stay with the baby. If the baby wakes unexpectedly, perhaps she can even hold the baby.

 

“He’s a very nice pilot.” She pauses. “He’s not actually a pilot.”

 

“What is he?”

 

“He’s a flight attendant.”

 

“How did you meet a flight attendant?” I say, pleased by the inanity, the frivolity of this conversation. Really, I am pleased to be having any conversation. I am so happy my mother is here and I am not sitting alone.

 

“It’s a long story,” she says. “But when I called you from a taxi, it wasn’t really a taxi.”

 

“What was it?” I say, stupidly, my brain dulled by motherhood, perhaps, which is what happens to you, they say.

 

“He keeps his car at the airport. He was kind enough to give me a ride.”

 

“If he gave you a ride, you should have been early. Or at least, not two hours late.” I pause, comprehension forming. “What did you do in his car? Mom?”

 

“Oh my goodness, nothing like that!” My mother flushes. “But he was very nice. We had a wonderful conversation.”

 

“That’s great,” I say and I mean it and I would ask for more details, such as whether she’s planning to see him again, but the baby is starting to stir. I watch her like I’m watching a bomb about to explode. Except, if a bomb were about to explode, I’d run. My mother is distracted. She hasn’t noticed yet. I stand from the table. “I’ll be right back. Could you watch her?” I don’t look back.

 

—

 

The last time my mother came to visit, I was very pregnant and my mother was the thinnest I’d ever seen her. She was on a mission. According to her surgeon, you were not supposed to touch your face until you had achieved your ideal weight. This was the reason she hadn’t gotten a mini-facelift years ago. For years, she was a slave to her daily pint of pecan ice cream, until, one day, she wasn’t. One day she realized she could live and thrive on little more than lettuce.

 

“Don’t lose any more weight,” I told her. “You’re thin enough.”

 

My mother patted my shoulder. “Don’t take this personally, honey, but your perspective might be a little skewed.” She was very concerned for me and how unwieldy I must feel, how uncomfortable I must be in my swollen body. But I thought I looked fine, maybe better than I’d ever looked. I’d asked her to wait a month before visiting so she could be in town for the birth, but she said she could not push off her trip because she needed to schedule her surgery before the doctor’s schedule was full and she really wanted to get my feedback before she made her final decision. There were so many options, she said—facelift, brow lift, botox. “We could Skype,” I said but she shot that down quickly. She needed me to see her in person, the texture of her skin, the full 360 degrees.

 

She had not been to the city in a while, since before the divorce. Like a flower, you could see her drinking in the energy; you could see her bloom. Smohio, Ohio, she said, she loved everything about the city, the noise and the streets and the interesting little apartments.

 

“When you were a baby,” she said, “we lived in an apartment like this.” I knew this story. Living in that apartment as a hopeful young wife was a shining time for her. Dad was gone all day, a low-level administrator, not yet the boss. The days were just us, playing in the complex playground, walking to the mall next door. She loved to tell how there was a hole in the fence between the mall and the complex, two missing boards. The shortcut saved ten minutes walking, a lot in the winter. The geometry of it was tricky, but after many attempts, she figured out how to take me out and angle the stroller through just right.

 

On that trip, we were both waiting, preparing for a big change. In the mornings, I put on my one pair of dress pants with the stretchy panel and took the train to my boss’s office in midtown East, where I worked as an executive assistant. In the afternoons my mother and I wandered the city in the late September heat, shifting from one café to the next, where I would sit back with my hands on my belly, under which I could feel the baby moving, poking and pushing from inside of my body, and my mind was overtaken with the strangeness of this, I couldn’t really think about anything else, but my mother’s mind was somewhere else. When the waiters came to ask us if we wanted something to drink, she’d be pulling at her face, lifting the skin with her fingers, asking if this was too tight or not tight enough. I wanted to be able to tell her that she looked fine how she was, but the truth was, she looked so much better, younger and fresher, when she lifted up her face.

 

A week after the baby was born, she backed out of her facelift, paying a steep penalty for the cancellation. She spent her deposit on a peel and fillers instead. “I’d love to come see how you look,” I told her. “But I really can’t leave this baby.”

 

Now, in the bathroom mirror, I look at my own face, which would look better with a little makeup. I luxuriate in the ease of washing my hands and smoothing out my hair without a baby tucked under my arm. I feel so light and unencumbered I could fly straight up to the sky.

 

—

 

When I get back, the baby is screaming. I hear her before I see her. The sound of her cry is the sound of pure uncomprehending terror. She always sounds like this when she cries. Are these her authentic emotions, I wonder, or is she the girl who cries wolf all day long?

 

“Where were you?” says my mother, thrusting her into my arms.

 

People are looking at us. “Let’s go,” I say, as I bounce the baby up and down, bouncing her into oblivion. She quiets and falls asleep. I put her hat on her head and zip her into my coat, which is about three sizes too large for me, chosen because she and I will fit in it together.

 

On the street, I secure the baby to my body with one hand and push the empty stroller with the other. We trudge uphill and duck our heads against the blustery wind. Snowflakes swirl in the air.

 

“I think I’m finally ready,” my mother says, “to go back to work.” Now she is skinny and presentable; she has plans to expand her hypnotherapy business, to move from one-on-one sessions to larger seminars on stopping smoking and losing weight. She’s had to stop seeing most of her personal clients because they were getting too personal with her—they told her too much and made her worry at night, made her feel that she should help them in ways that went beyond the scope of hypnotherapy.

 

I also want to go back to work, but I am only an assistant. By the time we pay a babysitter, we don’t know if it makes any sense. I have the idea that my mother could do it. She could move to the city, watch the baby. In my mind, this is something she ought to do, should want to do, should be asking to do. But she hasn’t asked.

 

A couple blocks from my apartment, we are brought to a halt. Shouting, brakes screeching, a bicycle tipped over in the street, and a man in sleek spandex clothes standing by, helmet on this head, looking dazed. The driver gets out of the car, a young woman who looks terrified. Her blond hair is sleek and perfect. Her makeup is perfect. She is wearing razor-thin heels and short, wide pants that display her pale, delicate ankles. Her ankles must be freezing. Perhaps she is on her way to an interview? I feel certain that the interview was for the girl’s dream job and that she would have gotten it except that now she will not make the interview. Tears run down her face. “Did I actually hit you?” she says.

 

“You hit me,” says the man.

 

We cannot look away. We stay until the police arrive. I bounce to keep the baby asleep. The snow thickens and falls down on our heads and on the scene, obscuring the people and the street and the buildings, obscuring the man on the bicycle and the woman who ran into him, but none of this obscures what my mother and I have seen, by which I mean, the things we have seen in our minds, the more terrible things that could have happened.

 

—

 

We take the baby home. While I am feeding her, my mother dresses for dinner. She puts on a camel-colored dress and a big gold necklace. She looks wonderful. I’ve decided her face looks wonderful, too. The baby presses her soft skin into my skin. Very gently, she pets my shoulder with her chubby baby hand. When she’s done, I put her down on a blanket. I give my mother a hug, and her body feels strange to me, so thin, not at all like the mother I know, a woman who might eat half a cheesecake for dinner then go power-walking through her Ohio neighborhood, at any time of night, arms pumping away, a bullet in white tennis shoes, Walkman tuned to her motivational tape of the moment. She’d come back red-faced and full of ideas. The world is awakening, she might say. Get enlightened or get left behind.

 

My husband is supposed to be meeting us but he calls to say that he’s running late and we should go on ahead. I don’t have anything to wear and I mean that very literally. The only clothes that fit me are yoga pants, so I put on my nicest yoga pants, the ones that look the most like real pants. I tuck the baby into her stroller and by the time we’re out on the street she’s fallen asleep. My mother and I walk to dinner. We are shown to a table close to the door, presumably because we are saddled with a baby and might need to make a fast escape. Every time someone exits or leaves, we are hit with a blast of cold air, which makes this a terrible table for a baby.

 

We order a bottle of wine, something my mother and I have never done together. I can’t drink much because of the baby but I assume my husband will take most of my share. I am drinking wine with my mother, who looks like a glamour girl, and she is talking to me about men, how much she wants to meet a man. She orders a salad without any dressing. She takes one tiny sip of wine. I eat all the bread in the basket. I can’t stop drinking the wine or asking my mother questions. I am having a wonderful time. “What about the pilot?” I say. “I mean the flight attendant.”

 

“Oh,” she says. “Oh, I don’t think so. He’s always traveling all over the place.”

 

“There’s no reason why you can’t travel,” I say. “Shouldn’t you travel? You’re so free. There’s no reason for you to stay in Ohio. You’re unencumbered. You could travel all the time.” I am getting excited. I keep drinking wine. “You could do your seminars like that,” I say. “You could just travel and give your seminars wherever you travel. Doesn’t that sound like a wonderful life? Maybe you should marry the pilot.”

 

My mother puts down her fork. She is taking a break though she hasn’t eaten anything. “Mark hasn’t called me,” she says. “He said that he would call me but he hasn’t. So I think that we should forget about that.”

 

“It’s only been a couple of hours,” I say. “Maybe he’ll call you tomorrow.”

 

“I was hoping that he would meet us for dinner. I was hoping to have a date.”

 

“Well, I don’t have a date either,” I say. “So I guess we can be each other’s date.” Really, the baby is my date, and I’m worried that my date might be waking up. I watch her like I can hypnotize her with my will to go back to sleep.

“I’m tired,” my mother says.

 

“Move here!” I say. “There are men everywhere! You’ll get a place near me. You can help with the baby.” As soon as I say this out loud, I realize how badly I want it. “Wouldn’t you like to spend time with the baby? You can help me, I can help you.” I knock over my glass of wine, I am so overwhelmed with the perfection of this idea. As I mop up the mess, I think how this is what I need. This is what she needs. For the first time in many years, my mother and I will fulfill each other’s needs.

 

My mother shakes her head. “I can’t move here. I don’t like it here. All the people. That accident. I’d be afraid to cross the street.”

 

“I thought you loved it here,” I say.

 

“I want to work on my business. I want to work on myself. There are so many years—I really don’t know what I was doing. I need to make up for lost time.”

 

“The baby’s here,” I say. We both look at the baby, who is starting to stir in her stroller. Her face wrinkles and un-wrinkles. I turn to my mother and I can see that she is unmoved.

 

Before I can reach her, the baby escalates to a full-on scream. As quick as I can, I lift her out of the stroller, but the crying doesn’t stop. Everyone is looking at us. I bounce and bounce. I look for a nook. The bathroom is tiny. There’s nowhere to go. The screaming gets louder. I am starting to panic. The waiter is approaching. I was silly to bring a baby to this place. In a second, I will get kicked out.

 

“I’m going outside,” I say to my mother, zipping myself and the baby into my jacket, pulling our hats onto our heads. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ll be back as fast as I can.”

 

Outside, the snow is falling. It lands gently on our heads while the baby screams. “Don’t cry, baby,” I say. “Don’t cry.” I feel a little woozy, my cheeks flushed and warm from the wine. Despite the crying, I am glad to be outside, where the air is bracing and fresh, where the baby can scream to her heart’s content without disturbing anyone—anyone other than me. This is where we belong.

 

We walk to the end of the block and come back. The baby is starting to quiet but I can’t quite bring her inside. Through the window, I watch my mother, who is eating her salad, one leaf at a time. She does not touch the bread. She looks lonely to me, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she wants to be lonely. Maybe being lonely is better than the alternatives.

 

After a couple minutes, my husband shows up with a camel scarf around his neck and ear clips on his ears, huffing from the cold. He is finally here. He is my most familiar person, but I feel like I haven’t seen him in weeks.

 

“Hey,” he says. “What are you doing out here?” He puts an arm around my shoulder, kisses the top of my head. The baby lets out a sigh and relaxes her body into my body. I relax my body into his body. The snow falls and falls on all of our heads.

 

“Go in there,” I say. “I’ll be in in a minute. Just sit with her at table, okay?”

 

“Okay,” says my husband. He opens the door. Warm air rushes out. Cold air rushes in. He greets my mother. He gives her a hug. He takes off his coat and sits in the chair across from her, the chair where I was sitting before. The snow is melting in his dark hair. I can make out the faint sheen of wet. He talks to her, she shows him something in her notebook, and I feel calm, the baby’s body against my body makes me calm, but underneath I am bereft. She starts to smile. He takes a sip of my wine. She takes a bite of her salad.

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The Pageant

“Spain cannot be blamed for the crassness of the discoverers.”

      —William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain

 

 

A man I love says, Why do you worry about where you come from? You’re here. Is that not enough?

 

—

 

Bananas ripen to a bloom like a black cloud.

 

—

 

Mestizo comes from the Latin mixticus. A mix a mix a mix. Say mixticus six times while looking in the mirror. If you have at least one foot in the Americas, you will conjure up un conquistador noble y su indio salvaje y inocente. White hand clasping brown hand.

 

—

 

The 16th century indigenous chieftain, Lempira, is today renowned for leading the (unsuccessful) rebellion against the conquistadors in Honduras.

 

—

 

In the language of the Lencas, Lempira means “Lord of the cows” or “Lord of the grass.”

 

—

 

In the 1980s, two Honduran lempiras were worth the equivalent of one US dollar; today the exchange rate is twenty-four HNL for one dollar.

 

—

 

Lempiras folded into tiny squares nestled in my tiny hand for a trip to the corner store. In the suburbs, the loamy smell creates a palimpsest.

 

—

 

Honduras is not a plantation. To be a plantation, one requires a crop, workers, and overseers. But if the workers were Black in a country that had no Blacks, if that thought rendered the worker invisible, well then, who were these people before our very eyes, ingloriously sweating their singing?

 

—

 

Alfonso Guillen Zelaya, my second cousin three times removed, is, according to Wikipedia, “the greatest Honduran poet and intellectual in history.” He was also a journalist, my family said, contra el imperialismo. I was told he was exiled to Mexico in 1933 by the tyrant Tiburcio Carias Andino. But the history books say Zelaya, with his American-born wife, left of his own accord.

 

—

 

Until 1931, the Honduran currency was the peso. At least twenty-two countries, past and present, have used the peso as currency. Peso, in Spanish, means “weight.”

 

—

 

During a several-months-long rebellion in 1537, in which Lempira led 30,000 men, he was lured out by the Spanish who were offering to negotiate a ceasefire. History says that Lempira was ambushed and shot by the Spanish, and it is this sequence—a request for peace, an ambush, and a murder—that the school children of Honduras act out year after year on July 20th, Lempira Day.

 

—

 

My dad—who reminded me of Harry Belafonte, of Sydney Poitier—fed his melancholic nostalgia during my childhood, wallpapering our atmosphere with Motown. He told me this after heart surgery. They picked me, he said laughing. One year, I was the Spaniard. The one who shot Lempira through the heart.

 

—

 

Memories stick like breadcrumbs in my throat.

 

—

 

Zelaya’s poetry in Spanish is melodic but also didactic and pastoral. Zelaya’s poetry idealizes nature as a way of simplifying and cleansing a land and its people of complexity.  The poems say, Honduras is not a plantation. The poems watch the land buckle under the weight of her masters.

 

In a poem translated by William Carlos Williams, the voice says:

 

Lord, I ask a garden in a quiet spot

Where there may be a brook with a good flow

A humble little house covered with bell-flowers

And a wife and a son who shall resemble Thee.

 

What does God look like?

 

—

 

My hair was straight once, inky blue-black strands, each a representation of logic and perfection. I looked more like Lempira then.

 

—

 

It is said that el indio Lempira died in an ambush. And it is this ambush and subsequent death that the children of Honduras have acted out every year in hundreds of schools across the country since the 1930s. One eyewitness account, written in 1558 by Rodrigo Ruiz, a Spanish national in service to the Crown, states that Lempira died in battle. This account was discovered in the 1980s, and yet the pageant continues. Lempira is tricked into this death. Lempira the guileless martyr, símbolo heroico de la patria.

 

—

 

You have a beautiful nose, my father would tell me, with thumb and index finger lightly rubbing then pinching his nostrils. It’s so narrow. I don’t understand what it is to love or not to love a nose.

 

—

 

In 1926, as the government debates naming the currency after Lempira, a leaflet is distributed among workers calling for the sons of the invincible Lempira to defend the “land of Columbus” against Yankees and Blacks.

 

The poet Zelaya and other Honduran intellectuals support the measure to raise Lempira’s symbolic profile. Prior to the mid-1920s, no image of Lempira existed.

 

—

 

The man hovers over the uncomprehending girl-child, lamenting his own features, like monstrous stamps—his nose, the unconscious touch of the lips to measure their fullness. “My woolly hair, my woolly hair.”

 

—

 

Someone said the word miscegenation today.

 

—

 

The last time I visited Lempira’s entry in Wikipedia, like an afterthought, in the description of circumstances behind his death, a line I’d never seen before: “The Spanish then ate his corpse in disrespect.” What a fitting symbol of el mestizaje in Honduras. Europe, like Saturn, devouring us like little children.

 

—

 

My baby doll diapered. Brown eyes that click shut when you lay her down. Hair so soft, so effortlessly curly. A dark cloud unseen in the sky.

 

—

 

No matter how many bananas were harvested, more were needed. Bunch after bunch into the cold bellies of ships ready to set sail for far-off places. The hunger was endless. The ships filled the small port of La Ceiba. The ships would leave, empty the port, only to be replaced by newer, larger, and emptier vessels. All this rotation, under the hum of workers, from sea to field, year after year.

 

—

 

Until one day, just like that, the replacement ships began to dwindle and then just stopped coming. The harvested bananas had nowhere to go. The field workers filled the wheelbarrows until there were no more barrows to fill. The fruit hung heavy, not just in the trees, but in the air.

 

—

 

There is such a thing as too much sweet.

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The Crypt of Civilization

“It’s the size of a swimming pool,” I said, “and locked in stainless steel. Locked for six thousand years, in fact.” I was telling my son about the Crypt of Civilization, a time capsule in Atlanta. We were in the basement, sorting his toys into piles. An overdue project, because now he used electric razors; he studied for the driving test. I picked up a tiny plastic mare and her tinier plastic foal. I asked, “Do you want them, your Horse and Baby Joe?”

 

He shook his head. “Sounds ambitious,” he said, “that thing in Atlanta.” He was burning through the matchbox cars and the doll that looked like a businessman, the Lincoln Logs and the book in which the bear is forever snoring on. Discard, discard, discard.

 

“These are in there,” I said, holding up a log the size of a finger. “In the Crypt of Civilization.”

 

“Why save a bunch of sticks?” he said.

 

I kept talking. Other items in the crypt: recorded birdsong, aluminum foil, ashtrays, the form of a woman’s breast, a “Negro doll,” a piece of soap in the shape of a bull.

 

“Jesus,” he said, taking a pterosaur from my hands and tossing it with the discards. “Are you kidding me with that list?”

 

I shrugged. “It was 1940,” I said. “Not a great year for time capsules.” I didn’t say: As if there have been so many other, better years. Our hopes and our hubris, the human experiment laid bare, thanks to the Crypt of Civilization.

 

His class did a time capsule once, back when he was in the first grade. A moment in time, or, as the principal said, a moment in conversation. “What will we choose?” she’d asked. We were gathered in the gym on parents’ night, the thick heat of September rolling in through the propped-open door. “Will we choose something that says how far our civilization has come, like light bulbs, or will we choose things from today, from here in 2010?”

 

Later, his dad and I joked. Let’s put in some guns. A bottle of DEET. A white guy billionaire, maybe Jeff Bezos. But our coal hearts burned away when our son chose to add his stuffed lion. Other kids picked the yearbook, mechanical pencils, a photo of Phillip Stanning, the third grader who’d died of leukemia the year before. His parents gave the school their permission.

 

“Why tell me this now?” my son asked when I reminded him. He glanced at the clock, wanting to go upstairs, but I was thinking of stories unearthed. Of conversations between a dreamed-of future and the best and the worst of our past.

 

And what of the forgotten capsules? Conversations never had, conversations still in the earth, magnolia roots pushing against old tin boxes, letters in bulldozed attics, bottles left floating eternally at sea, through storms and under scorching skies. A metal ball orbiting the earth, the silence of that, its secrets tucked in like a heart.

 

“Mom,” he said. “Let’s be done. Let’s give it all away.” It was like this more and more with us. He looked forward, to the car he’d soon drive and the girls he’d soon kiss and to more distant visions—college, roommates, drugs, maybe—while I held his Horse, his Baby Joe and said, let’s build ourselves a capsule.

 

I scooped the discard pile my way. “I’m saving these,” I said, the Legos and the frog blanket and the board book with a dollop of oatmeal on it, long hardened into milky cement. The toys that came later—the stacking robots, the sticker sheets. He knew it would end this way, and I did too. An hour used or wasted, depending on who you asked.

 

“Time,” he said, standing up. “You always talk about time.”

 

As if this was so boring. As if time didn’t start and stop and shift to the left, didn’t corrode and make you whole. Didn’t change little boys who cried as they buried their lions into bigger boys who thought that Lincoln Logs were sticks, discard who they were for who they would become again and again and again.

 

And what of Phillip Stanning’s parents? Sometimes I wondered, across the hurried years, as the elementary school collected artifacts from one class and then another, moved from one principal to the next. As the Crypt of Civilization sat in its deluded wait. What did time become for them that April afternoon when they put their boy into the ground, when they tucked away that last thing with him, that final conversation, that favorite plushy bird?

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There They Are

my mother, my father. Her skinny
blue wrists, his ear caressing a cigarette.     In the beginning,
it is already too late,    but there is hunger & no time
to waste.    All they need are six hands, three mouths, a clockwork
yearning for locks of their own, windows square & fresh.    In the beginning,
my cry breaks my father, who flushes red at my fall, opens my face in search
of his mother.          Grasses, grasses on a country
road, hawthorn up to their waists,
aflame.     The crying of no mothers.  Temple bells hung
by the wind.    An October without moons,
a feeling I’ve been here before.  Dew on the page.
Windows billowing   wax paper.
Fall’s charred eyelids.     Toes pressing down my own wet
imprint.    Begin the world without a bang.
Water, air,   the Earth split into an egg,
elements halved for light.      No mothers, just two figures on a bicycle
for one.   A sweaty country road. Stoves that won’t start,
boxes of damp matchsticks.     Strain of a blue wrist
untucking cigarettes from his lips
prayer of hands inside the ashes of mothers,
single finger curving to a hush.    Careful,
hold the glass up to one eye, split the nucleus
with the other, explosions muted by winged lungs.
Put down my pen.    Unfold my eyes.  Count backwards
before legs, before longing, until I hit a snag in the web,
open,   to find my palm full of tears.
Once, there were no mothers. Trace the outline,
one, two, build a family from hunger.                   Listen, a cry, mine,
dragging her mother’s last breath up the jagged washboard as he soaps
my throat clean, baptizing his mother’s blackened lungs.
My mouth opens       to wake their beginning & just like that
blesses our downfall.
There, stretch the canvas, spread oil thin-thin
into our crevasses, what’s that in the distance?       No mother,
not the moon,      just six hands bent over a clock face with no opening,
porcelain spoons    raised to another’s lips,    tap – tap we widen
our insides until ink forks our edges.        In the beginning,
an October without night. Windows torn
open with flashlights. Hawthorn dawning a mother’s last breath.
Let me begin   again,

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Tell Your Mother

I grew up in a flash by your mother’s side.

 

Tell her I loved her deeply, like bells sounding in the distance, like the secret I had to rush to tell her. I loved your mother at the Lutheran summer camp where we got real with our Bibles, where we rehearsed on the Palace Theater stage in the wings while we murmured our parts and pantomimed our choreography before the curtain parted. As best friends, we made space for anything to happen to us, as long as it happened to us side by side, or was documented through letters that we posted in the mail that arrived steadily like ants creating a trail.

 

Tell your mother to tell you how we cut images of what you must be going to look like from magazine pages in the 1990s, how we clipped around your round face and big eyes from baby-food advertisements, certain it was  going to be you.

 

The first I saw of you was a roiling under her skin, kicking while she filmed her belly, feet stretched far before her.

 

Tell your mother to tell you the time, in the charged balm of adolescence, when we lay in a hammock on the fourth of July, watched neighbors tilt back in lawn chairs and for some reason, while we rocked  in the weave of the hammock, while sparklers crackled, and dry as a bone but intoxicated surely by the elation at simply being alive side by side, we laughed so hard at something that rocked us nearly over and to the ground, we peed our pants and tumbled down while fireworks shot up as the floodlight clicked on as the adults chatted, and I consider that place in the grass on the Clintonville lawn that exists with our imprint on it still, the sound of the dresser drawer opening for her to replace my clothes in the room she shared with her sister. We stayed up as late as the night would have us then paraded into the morning hours, just as we paraded from the hammock, our lack of shame like capes behind us.

 

Ask your mother if she remembers learning how to solve the problem of a house fire. The firemen brought a trailer filled with theatrical smoke to the library parking lot where we filed before the door like books to be shelved. There is a way out, we learned, if you crawl under the smoke, if you test the metal doorknob with the back of your hand. We crawled through the hallway, snickering always, toward the trailer exit where, successful, we’d hop out into the clear air having passed the test, and it was this way that we jumped from our tenth birthdays to our twelfth, and now years later we are here, the fire behind us, and you due in her arms in a matter of weeks.

 

When you arrive, she will feel your warm cheek with the back of her hand. Tell your mother that when you arrive, I will step back as she lights the firework fuse of your little life, that I will do my best to be a bellows to your flames.

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Some Mornings

Some mornings are not meant to be peaceful

they are full of tiny battles, body pains, and aches

coffee grounds spilled in the crack of tile

egg shells crushed against your spine

 

Some mornings are not meant to be hopeful

the sun’s tyrant gaze slips in through the gaps

the ceiling fan is a switchblade to the ear

alley cats scream their war cries to the world

 

Some mornings are not meant to be calm

the throbbing skull of a night, water-deprived

echoes inside itself, a reminder that the body

desires equilibrium and safety in this storm

 

No, some mornings are not meant to be peaceful

yet the day moves on, mixing with the night

the truce made since the dawn of time

where worries unwind, where thought dissolves,

 

where the world is reminded that dreams live

beyond the body and the body is a dream.

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Evil Comes in Many Ways

Listen, don’t ever talk to strangers. If a stranger approaches you, run the other way and scream at the top of your lungs. Dios, I couldn’t live with myself if you were ever kidnapped. Sorry, Manuelito, no trick-or-treating this year. But Mom, we’ll have adults chaperoning and… I don’t care who’s doing what. You shouldn’t be outside at night, in the dark where it’s easier to kidnap someone. Look at poor Jimmy Ryce, the authorities still haven’t found him. He was walking home in broad daylight when he was taken. That could have been you. You’re both the same age. Oh, stop rolling your eyes at me. Forget about going to the movies—fasten yourself on the sofa and read those Goosebumps books you like so much. I don’t wanna read, Mom. I wanna go out and play hide-n-seek. You can’t. Armando, you’re his stepfather: tell Manuelito he can’t go to no sleepover. What am I gonna tell him that he doesn’t already know? There’s been talk of attempted kidnappings, the whole county is having a panic attack. Anyway, there’s no reason to go out. Oh, no, Dios. Armando, didn’t you hear? They found Jimmy; he was raped, his body mutilated with a bush hook, the parts buried inside planters, encased in cement. A Cuban balsero did it. I heard about it on La Cubanisima radio program. Do you know what this means, Armando? Yes, I do. Remember I’m a balsero, too. Now they’ll point a finger at us hardworking immigrants. They’ll tell us to go back from where we came. That we’re all rapists and murderers. That we don’t belong here. They’ve done it before. That man has left a scorch mark on us all. This never would have happened in Cuba, communism or no communism. Mom, that’ll never happen to me. But it can happen to you, Manuelito; you can be kidnapped and killed and buried inside planters. Mom, I need to go to school. I can homeschool you. What about my friends? You don’t need friends: they’re a distraction. Armando, tell him his friends are a distraction. Let the boy go out, willya? Ah! You’re no use. Manuelito, stay home and eat all the helado you want. Go on, read your little Goosebumps book—I’m never reading Goosebumps again! Jimmy Ryce never would have died if he was a character in a Goosebumps book. Stop screaming. Now, where is that boy hiding—? Oye, Armando! Where’s my son? I can’t find him. Call the police! He’s been kidnapped. Espera, wait, we don’t know that yet. Maybe he’s with un amigo? He’s dead, buried God knows where. Breathe, mija, breathe. Let’s look for him. Miralo, here he is, hiding under the kitchen cabinet. Manuelito, coño, why are you hiding? Stop crying. All I wanna do is play with my friends. Please, let me go! But there’s evil in every corner. Go out through the front door, and it smacks you like a strong gust of wind. Sit down on the sofa, stay home. You’re safe here, you’ll always be safe with me.

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