RED FACTOR a Thesis Submitted to Kent State University in Partial

RED FACTOR

A thesis submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts

Natasha L. Rodriguez-Carroll

August, 2016

Thesis written by Natasha L. Rodriguez-Carroll B.A., Kent State University, 2012 M.F.A., Kent State University, 2016

Approved by

_Catherine Wing______, Advisor

_Robert Trogdon______, Chair, Department of English

_James L. Blank______, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ……………………………... vi

Prehistory ………………………………………... 1

Red Factor ……………………………………….. 2

Litany ……………………………………………. 3

Agnation ………………………………………… 4

Field Marks ……………………………………… 6

A Walking Poem ………………………………... 7

Katydid ………………………………………….. 8

Pomaceous ………………………………………. 9

At Harvest ……………………………………….. 10

Dead Heading …………………………………… 11

Agitation ………………………………………… 12

Salt and Its Combinations ………………………. 13

Hibernaculum …………………………………… 14

Shenandoah National Park, 1994 ……………….. 15

Annuals ………………………………………….. 16

Soil ………………………………………………. 17

iii

El Derrame ………………………………………. 18

A Human Figure ………………………………… 19

Basic Facts ………………………………………. 20

My Brother is Getting Divorced ………………… 21

Nymph …………………………………………... 22

Leaving North Carolina …………………………. 23

Simulacrum………………………………………. 24

The Fool, The Cliff, A Dog ……………………... 25

Senescence ………………………………………. 26

Nocturne ………………………………………… 28

En Masse ………………………………………… 29

Canini ……………………………………………. 30

In the Company of Vanths ………………………. 31

Dussel Farm, October …………………………… 32

Advice for Women Turning Into Their Mothers ... 33

Deciduous Teeth ………………………………… 34

Cultivar …………………………………………. 36

Beckwith Orchard, September …………………... 37

An Ancestral Function …………………………... 39

Pest Bird ………………………………………… 40

Small-Island Endemic …………………………… 41

Vejigante ………………………………………… 42

A Doughboy’s Equipment ………………………. 43

El Buey del Mar …………………………………. 44

Stephanie ………………………………………... 45

Corpora …………………………………………. 46

Crib Death ………………………………………. 47

Velorio …………………………………………... 48

Residence Time …………………………………. 49

Cortejo …………………………………………... 50

Cold Working …………………………………… 51

Savings Time in Autumn ……………………….. 52

Birthday …………………………………………. 53

A Threshold ……………………………………... 54

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Most of the poems in this thesis are about love, family, and motherhood. I’d like to thank my husband, Matthew, for all of his support during this process, especially when

I made it hard to love me. I’d like to thank my daughter, Isabella, for being a brilliant and funny person, and for allowing me to write the odd moments of her childhood. I’d like to thank the rest of my family for being fodder, and I hope they never read a single poem

I’ve written.

I’d also like to thank my thesis advisor, Catherine Wing. When I write a poem I like to read it obsessively for a day, and then I walk away and try to forget it. When I eventually return to the poem to edit, it’s her voice I hear in my head. I’m also grateful to

Mary Biddinger, an endless source of encouragement, who is the sort of professor I hope

I can be one day. I’d also like to thank Craig Paulenich, the person who welcomed me to the NEOMFA, for his participation in my committee. Finally, I’d like to acknowledge

David Giffels and Caryl Pagel. Their classes changed the way I viewed my own writing, and helped shape this manuscript.

Prehistory

Before I was a woman I was a rosebush, petaled eye closing over the yeasty mouth at dusk, a shudder of sun musk heavy with pollen and the snap of apple. Green needled shrub, a body of thorny limbs and pliant joints growing slant against the side of the pot. I was a briar stretching toward the falling sun, ballooning into red hipped fruit. Before that I was sepal and leaflet, mutating to funnel the dying light into spiraling galaxies, a bulge of heat and dust, my atoms echoing against every human nerve. I had the milk sap of an infant and the foliage of a crone, sweet stemmed and bloodless against the pines. I first sprouted in the trial grounds, a test garden for men learning to harvest seed and irrigate, wielding copper and stone in their dark hands. Before I was a woman I was a rootball bound by the organic seizing of corolla and calyx, wilting from mineral thirst, a series of tendrils tensed for one last push against the earth.

Red Factor After “Bosque de las experiencias” by William Morales

From the roadside forest, a flutter in the trees and an explosion of leaves and feathers, tiny bodies burst into scarlet against the asphalt and glass.

Something freed them—a girl too young to know any better, the door to a wire cage left ajar, curtains pulled aside a window cracked for breeze.

What are they doing so far from home, flocks of sulfur and ochre that flash among brush pines and acorn oaks, ascending on flat timbres before the graceless fall.

I have dreams I hover over the city at daybreak, legs pumping to reach a lone spire or an angled shingle before the memory of earth sends me plummeting.

Canaries who have known only metal and air, poor navigators crushed against the road grit urge me to stay alight where they have failed, to tread the headwind and aim southward in the moments before waking.

Litany

Any earnest word is as important as the first one uttered by a baby, not any infant, who names you as hers above any other woman, over any possible mother, over your own mother who mothers better and worse than any mother. Better and worse than your mothering. Any daughter is not your daughter. Any girl is not your girl, not just any kind of girl, any one of the girls on any screen or in any car. Any artwork you hang methodically, on any free surface. Any time you run out of space, you can store your souvenirs in any small crevice in any room. You can make any meal, as long as you have the ingredients. Any laundry day might mean any number of things if no one has any socks. Any week could pile up into a litany of collected things you have not yet accomplished. Any task the last on the list, any chore the first. Anyone can do it. Anything you might write might have to wait. Any person can trudge through any amount of work you do, any of them can do it in half the time. Any man could do it, sure. It’s not any trouble. Any time becomes always. Any given day you are more or less free than any day before it. Any day can be the most important: any Sunday, any Sabbath. Any time of day you can be called upon. The school will call at any time. Be prepared. You might be called to pick up the slack if anyone fails. Don’t get any more comfortable than you had planned on. Who do you think you are, anyway?

Agnation i. Until the family tree project in fourth grade, I thought no one else knew their grandpas, we just carried their stories folded inside us like handkerchiefs, monograms unraveling into strands that hooked into our tiny ribs and tugged our insides at the remembering. But the others brought plastic reams bulging with yellowed paper and pictures of ancestors, unrolling posters to reveal their work, crude branches heavy with common English names. ii. Genaro came to visit once. He spit a lot, put rum in his milk, coffee in his vodka. He taught my brother how to roll cigarettes with two Doublemint wrappers and his own sweaty little thumbs. It was a short summer. We called him Grandpa Jerry, watched him chainsmoke on the porch, lifting his hat to ruffle the scant waves that still clung to his head, the skin dim as caramel. He had weak hands and a wet cough, a knot of cheap gold chains on his chest. My mother’s murky green eyes, same as his, and a blank space above the name. iii. Above my father’s branch, another empty circle. They called him ‘Zules because his eyes were blue, even though he wasn’t white. The same threadbare story, my grandmother’s rage filling the kitchen. I thought I might see my grandfather once we moved, blocks from his Cleveland house, but our birthday came with early snow and left when my father started screaming at the television after dinner and cake, the wish frozen against my tongue. iv. In front of my class I saw my insufficient branches, stunted and leafless at the crown, black ink birds sketched to perch in the absence. No one wanted stories about an old man in the world wearing my father’s face, smiling with my uncle’s teeth. No one wanted to see shards of brown bottle glass

4 in a keepsake box. I told the class my grandfathers were ghosts, dead as white sugar, deadwood limbs, just names in cheap thread aging to grey.

Field Marks

Three toed arrangement named passerine, clinging where the branch bends.

A shuffle of snowed wing reveals the ochre breast, coral-belly, crest and pins— feathers that mark him a son of woodland north, song bird, the fire’s twin.

He is robust and orange, seed-eaters strong bill testing winter’s worth, the frost and night scale blowing south on arctic air that whistles blue and shrill.

He rushes past, scarlet flare and rustle, an icicle chime when brittle limb is bared.

Red specter along the tree line, an abandoned nest among the pines.

A Walking Poem

The summer before my brother was big enough for school, we spent weekends out in God’s nature under the spread of white Evangelical tents, crouched at the edge of a tributary river watching sinners reborn. Pastors bent to baptize crying people, the water churning around their bodies. I liked to stand at the shore with my father as he directed the congregation in worship, starting prayer rounds or chanting psalms. I felt important because he was important. I let him rest his dense hand on my hair and watched the robed queue on the sand.

Once, through an old pasture he let us lead the way back to camp, my brother tethered to my hand as we parted the grass together. I felt the weeds stinging but tugged him forward anyway, pulling him through the pain. Our mother stopped us when she saw blood, frantic as she picked burrs from our skin. Our father lifted us up, tucked one under each arm and pressed us close against him, tightening his hands against our chests. He trampled the plants, his heavy feet grinding the barbs into the dirt. We watched, weightless, his even pulse and the falling night lulling us to sleep.

Katydid

At midnight a creaking in the hall startles, clatter from a green leaflet body trembling by the door, lacking the camouflage to save him from my jar. Bush cricket, insect baby, long-horned hopper rubbing limbs together to aim at buzz and music, failing with the bludgeon of wings against glass. I dim the lights and hold my breath, shadows rustling in imitation of forest and grass. Trapped, he calls to the malleable-bodied nymph I know will never come, his veined body vibrating with longing as he sings us both toward the release of morning.

Pomaceous

I was unprepared that first night to feel how our bodies warmed as we moved closer in dim light, tethered by our elastic skins flushed from too many beers. A friend’s blue sofa dusted with cat hair, Michael Jackson skipping on the record player, someone’s menthols we smoked to keep awake. None of it dulled the aroma of cut apples hovering around our bodies.

Scientists name compounds— the esters found in fruit oils that define fragrance or flavor, a jumble of letters that force the lips to move in an imitation of feeling. Others measure the link between a lover’s smell and the release of hormones, how glands excrete sweat and musk, synapses sparking in response to a frantic heart.

I can define this another way— the moment when the front door clicks shut an hour before sunrise and I turn my sleepy face toward the empty pillow and unfurl more tender in the darkness than I am in light, and I breathe. The taste of apple in my mouth, scent leaching into sinew and flesh, settled between the hollows of bone.

At Harvest i. Tell me a grander gift than an apple ripening on zaftig limb, and the girl straining for the stubborn branch, and the quick arms that lift her up to face the autumn sun to grasp it, both anxious for the crisp of honeyed flesh on baby teeth. ii. Watch the man fold his body onto tired carpet in a dim room, and the calloused pads of his hands that scratch cards as they play. Tell me of an easier loss than his intentional misstep, and her lips stretched tight against the grin, a face breaking open in delight. iii. He carries the day in his palm, carves from the hours his whole heart, each vacuumed chamber filled brim-top, every sinew psalming. Tell me, beyond the blood, who can ever be father enough?

Dead Heading

What it takes to be a good gardener often involves old bobby pins, a shallow pot, the fancy mixed soil. Can’t let the seedlings run wild along borders, my father says, or breed in the grass. You have to press them into the ground so they can grow roots and thrive. I left my parents’ house and learned to sprout peas in a jar and herbs from peat coins, to snip brown feathery blooms to trigger a new shoot, to cut low on the stem and kill a summer’s worth of zinnia. My mother cried when I left her. She has no one to cook from scratch, no one to tend the ancient spider plant weighed down by its own babies. I am best at curbing what should flourish— hearty chamomile, a rosemary bush. The home-bound brother a jobless baby lumbering around upsetting everyone. I rarely visit my parents, rarely remember to water the tomatoes spilling the pot, to pinch off the suckers in the morning. I weep in the bathroom at night, and it is all I can do to keep the loose-leafed shefflera from mouldering into rot, but my daughter’s roots never thirst. She is unfurled to the sun. My parents can never kill their plants, even after a night of soft frost on the porch. There is always a bit of fresh green for the rootbound, the coddled ones, their flowerheads stagnant, heavy with blossom.

Agitation

It begins with the folding— her joints cracking at the pads bending fingers down and inward, the precise mounds of tiny white towels that smell faintly of vinegar solution— and she is alone in the apartment, inundated by the tang of hot cotton. She washes her husband’s clothes, dries them, leaves them crumpled and static on his side of the bed. He knows little about laundering— how to wring the bleach from the pulp and scrub a stained heart clean— comfortable in the chemical soak, and meanwhile settles his dirt into the pockets of everything, a fine dust ironed and starched into the creases of thin fabric. On the island, in the countryside, some women still wash at the river, pants with the dark imprint of a man beaten against the tumbled stones with the wet slap of his imagined face. Some women lift water from wells so deep the dark swallows the bedrock.

Salt and its Combinations

My grandmother and her sister, indistinguishable, both red as brick powder with roach-black hair that wafted like seaweed, pinned into waves. Their black eyes watched the cards, the stars, the rattling cowries in the old brujo’s bowl. Their hearts loved the same bone dead grunts with palm nut hands, wearing walking blues. They drew cards for dirt daubers and cane men with machetes at the hip, rattling lunch tins. They mixed violet oils and devil’s vinegar, mixed Keep A Man perfume for sagging wives from sesame and lilies steeped in Holy Water. They called rain bathwater as it filled the grave, washed each other and filed their teeth.

Two doll babies hatched from the same egg— one sister burying her children in bile, the other stacking husbands into an altar of white stones. Once, my grandmother struck a church man with lightning, burned his bible into a cross of ash. Even spirits feared them, tobacco smoke silvering the air above the sacred statues, the white candles.

I’ve got that same serpent’s blood and bay rum urine, rough hands that grip hard enough to tear skin. Smell me, the sweat of garlic and brass rings. I’ve inherited that thirst for island tidewaters, a hunger for stunted beach trees and wish beans. I’m on the foot track to brimstone, eating cure herbs and water bread, cutting coffee with milk and rum, waiting in stale air for the accumulation of shadow. At dusk, they blow cold breath across my neck, voices rising to rattle the coffin nails.

Hibernaculum

I didn’t like the house with the snakes, and afraid of the unfamiliar, unkempt yard I preferred the safety of the boardwalk, braced up a few inches from the ground, a path of narrow wooden slats that led to the front door and rattled as we ran across. Right before sunset, as beams of light stretched long into the cracks, I could catch a glimpse of shadows writhing in the dirt. I didn’t like the drafty room on the third floor I shared with my brother, or the steep, slanted stairs, didn’t like the way voices in the kitchen wafted up like steam, distorted into jumbled words.

My mother loved the lawn snakes, fascinated by their ropey, stippled bodies, the slivers of dun and green that cut through stalks of cottony dandelions and wild onion. She refused to let my father mow the lawn, content to settle in her camping chair, feet bare and knee deep in the wilderness of our new backyard. She knitted an endless procession of blanket squares and had conversations with the whistling air. In the afternoon, we would walk to the playground so my brother could roam and tumble in woodchips while I sat on a swing and read a book, toes dangling and brushing the packed, grey dust.

I didn’t like the way the other parents watched us, a firing squad of blue eyes and frosted hair. I didn’t like the way they sneered at my mother who shouted in rapid, hybrid Spanish across the park, whose skin darkened more with each sunny day. She never noticed them, too preoccupied with brown-bag lunches, baskets of my father’s laundry, and every ghost haunting the corners of her mind. I was the one who returned the stares, raw and defiant. I waited for the coil and strike, waited for the snap of poisoned fangs, an impatient child, body tensed as I watched the swaying grass.

Shenandoah National Park, 1994 After “Camino hacia lo desconocido” by Angélica Rivera

The morning the church woman drowned, before anyone had heard the news, my father woke us up just as the sun began to watercolor the mountains. He made our mother bundle us into layers of wool and cotton, and took us to the lake. There was one boat left, tipped against the rack, and only two child-sized lifejackets. It took my inexperienced parents a while to get it into the water and arrange the oars. Paint peeled off the weathered wood in strips and collected on the damp gravel that passed for sand. They helped us in.

Out on the water my brother wanted to stand and look over the side into the murk, but I told him there was nothing to see— the lake was inky with algae bloom, covered by a fog that the light could not penetrate.

Later, after breakfast with the other campers and a short worship service among the trees, a little boy told me that so-and-so had died, eaten by sweet water sharks in the lake. The truth was even more terrible— a poor swimmer, she had stood in the boat and lost her balance. Her companions tried to pull her up, but the lady was tangled in freshwater weeds that held her under like cool, green hands and soft, clean hair.

I remembered my mother’s nervous fingers that morning on the boat, how they clutched my brother and sat him still, how they clutched my hands that picked at the plastic buckles, her brown skin bone white at the knuckles while my tired father manned the oars at the back of the boat, squinting to navigate, pushing us deeper into the cloud.

Annuals

Summers were for parks, weekend hours spent rambling amid the humid green.

I would wander in search of what flowered— heady violet vine-buds clinging to oak bark, patches of buttercup in un-mown grass, clustered shoots of bluebottle and wild garlic.

Furtive, I would crouch to pinch off the heads and stuff them into my pocket, the feral aromas crushed into the fabric, lingering on my small, greedy hands.

I liked to hunt around the cultivated beds of the nature buildings, carefully skirting mounds of pressed earth and dyed mulch to linger at the tightly-packed marigolds.

At home, I would rinse my collection in the bathroom sink, fingers rubbing away the dirt with steam and soap. I would bundle the flowers in paper towel and secret them to my room. Alone, I would dismantle my catch— picking apart the sepals and stamens, setting aside woody stems, bruised florets, anything that hinted at a fresh decay.

I placed the sorted pieces on my tongue, tiny clusters of flame unfurling into radiance.

I saved the crowns for the end, their amber sallow from the heat of my skin.

Hunched, I would chew the blooms whole, savoring the bitterness, the grit of pollen clinging to those handfuls of minute suns, swallowed by the black hole of my mouth.

Soil

When Papito and I walked together through the garden, the dark earth sunk under our feet. By the leaning fence, we rested away from the relentless light of spring. I sat on the grass in his shadow, peeling splinters from his walking stick. With my finger I made a well between the grass roots to watch the scurrying ants and the frightened pill bugs. When I held the dirt in my hand, packed it tight to the palm, it formed a moist ball. I would carry it with me, leaving crumbs to mark where I had been. Papito said it wasn’t the right kind for growing platanos, and nothing citrus either, but the pigeon peas did alright. I tried to memorize what he said, when to plant the eggplants or when to dig up the onions, his Spanish circling my head like a lazy fly, brushing the ear. When he told me about the mango trees and beach sunsets, or how my father would pick ripe passion fruit from the bush by their porch as a child, I longed for a land I had never seen. My toes would curl past my sandals to burrow in the soil, and I would try to imagine the ocean. He would save his coffee grounds and old eggshells in a plastic bag. Together we would till them into the garden, mounding the soil around the pepper plants. Sometimes there were vegetable peels and scraps of food, and I would hold my breath from the smell. He would take the bag from me and finish the work, so I could get some fresh air. I learned to love what a person could raise with hard work and good soil and bright sun, but nothing I grow ever comes to fruit.. Without his hands to guide me, I have no magic of my own.

El Derrame

My father turned in place for hours by the phone, wearing new circles into the grey linoleum. I wanted to untangle the long cord where it looped around his body as he punched in Ohio numbers with blunt fingers, accepting long-distance calls, asking nurses for surgery updates and a prognosis on paralysis. When he spoke, he would curl his hands until the knuckles whitened, every joint jerking with a dry crack. I didn’t look at his face, not once, but I held my brother’s damp hand until we slept. After the frantic packing, Maryland rest stops, the drool stain my brother left in the rented car, after the bleached white sheets, bleached walls, the jumps and beeps of her monitored heartbeat, they let us take her home, swaddled in sweaters and cotton tights, muted in fabric. We pretended we could tell what she said, imagined words in the warbles of her tongue. In the kitchen, my mother chased away the silence with cooking and pill-crushing, morning television playing low. So many pots of rice and beans left on the stove, the boiled coffee trickling through a cloth filter. When Papi wasn’t on the phone, he would fold himself into a wooden chair by his grandmother’s bed, a small boy again, and lay his fist by her mottled hand. Her fingers twitched, his skin tightened, and that last inch stretched into every long afternoon.

A Human Figure

When my father forced us to eat dinner at his mother’s apartment, I liked to sneak into the bedroom to sample her Avon perfumes and powders, to stroke earrings and necklaces I wasn’t supposed to touch. Baby dolls tracked my movements with glass eyes, their heavy glazed bodies propped delicately against every surface— the headboard, dresser top, a nightstand. In a corner, on a child’s chair, the largest one stared boldly at the vanity, the uncanny gaze of her green eyes in the mirror more repulsive than my grandmother’s unseasoned food. The first time I saw the doll wearing my sweater, I nearly cried. In the closet, stacked boxes of discarded things my mother had marked for Goodwill, a neatly steamed and folded hoard of cotton underpants and too-small school blouses, church shoes, and the ruffled skirts I unwrapped at Christmas and never wore. I imagined my grandmother and the doll, her fingers pressing red hair into waves with rhinestone pins, holding those articulated bisque hands to paint the tiny nails with pink polish. On the doll, my things were beautiful and girlish. I was plain and small, with dark hair and unruly skin, suddenly ugly in that flowery room. She was paler than any person I had ever met, alien in her whiteness, a clever doll that mimicked sleep. When I pushed her, she fell in a heap on the carpet, lashes fanning against her soft cheeks, but under those shuttered lids I saw a whisper of movement, an animal twitch that followed me long after I left the room.

Basic Facts

It crawled into her room from a hole in the wall by the vent, crumpled onto the carpet from the plaster and damp, and she came awake to its flapping. It was dark and velvet with disease. It clung to the ceiling, that tin screaming rattling the jawbone, the silver dimple teeth. This was last August. I talk about time, and I mean that I also crawled from a hole once, and after her birth I was the hole, and after that time it was a different hole I crawled from. We patched that hole a year ago. It had a terrible face. In the dark I see the hole. The whole. In the dark I see it swept into the corners of a clean room. What I mean to say is that I have also flapped my dark wings. I have also come awake to its screaming. I mean that before it arrived and broke her sleep we were in the next room, whole, before she came awake to its flapping, and before that I was the dark velvet thing clinging, circling her sleeping face.

My Brother is Getting Divorced

Remember how we almost flew to the park, our small feet skimming the wild grass and clover by the bank? Saturday afternoons by the river and old-time hymns still shrill in my ears. Our father crouched to pick the flattest stones while you stretched your shirt into a basket. You filled it with chunks of smoothed quartz and calcite, banded sandstone, chips of ashy slate. I liked to pick a few stones at a time, practiced how to sling my arm and sharply snap my wrist before release, watching to see if our father noticed. My best skips were like his, the stones hopping in four or five long arcs, coasting the water like dragonflies before slipping under the reeds. He was always close by you, a rough hand on your bony shoulder, or bending over to give you his own rocks, thin and balanced. We watched you hurl them at the other shore and scare the water fowl into stuttered flight. Look, I’m not saying I was better, just more patient, more lucky, and quicker to learn. Sometimes I helped you search, clapped when you managed two bumps and clonk, and sometimes we watched you stomp off in tears, rubbing your face and kicking clumps of patchy grass. This is a lot like that.

Nymph After “5 days before Bozo relinquishes the rainbow” by Jonathan Torres

She wakes from a nap to a heart resting right between her breasts, puddled in sweat. It is a relief to finally know the whole of it, the twisted ventricle and limp filaments leaking clear and pumping weakly. Landlocked, she’d thought it was gone— for years there had been a deep hollow, ribs echoing at the rapping of knuckles.

Everyone is gone except the cicadas at the window, cracking in technicolor, their molted shells shadowing the blue. Time is short. She sets a clean towel down, gives the waning heart a few hard shakes. Who knew it rattled with sand, brown bottle sea glass, and waterlogged driftwood that can never burn clean.

She lifts the heart to her tipped mouth, presses the last drops of salt to her tongue. Diminished, it is nothing but old meat picked apart with gnarled fingertips, yellowed fat and red gristle chewed until she can remember the waves again, crashing bones against the greystone cliffs. She licks blood from under her nails.

Leaving North Carolina

We had forgotten about the cold, the southern spring heat balm-slick against skin for four days now. The stars emerged before we crossed state lines, bringing a chill wind that cut through our slouched pants and loose-knit sweaters, as we clutched cardboard cups of scalding coffee and dashed toward the parked cars.

I kept vigil through the night as you navigated foreign hills and we sipped, steam softening the edge of bare road. Hours before, everyone I called condemned your foolish decision to drive straight through to Cleveland. I wanted to insist, My father is not crazy. You just don’t understand our ways. Instead I huddled and watched you, wanting to say that I know how a longing heart compels the body to movement, that I have felt it too, but we had forgotten how to speak to each other years ago.

Between here and home lies the winding asphalt of three states and a waiting daybreak. No storm in the distance tonight, only the ever-present cloud of silence that hangs between your seat and mine.

Simulacrum After “Bozo relinquishes the Rainbow” by Jonathan Torres

When she is lonely, she walks to the river and stares into the horizon, bare feet mired in the wet muck of rainwash. Light smears color at the sky’s drowsy edge as the stars fade, her body weightless in the lingering dark. She struggles to remember the old stories, clay boys with strong arms, called to creation with a god’s name, holding spell scrolls against their mute tongues. Her only tools are her hands, nearly divine, kneading mud from tears and dust into an imitation of a man. At midday she wakes in her own bed, the sun burning a fever against her dry eyes and sore limbs. There is a clumsy mass hulking in the shadow of the door. She hears his breathing, dry and hollow, the creaking of floorboards under his heavy feet. Ash and sulfur charge the air, and drying blood beads on skin cracked from salt. She calls to him, beckons until the bulk of his human form looms dark above, and presses a single red finger to his mouth.

The Fool, The Cliff, A Dog

When the cards tell you to find a man you find one, luring him out from the bar by the mouth, feeding him morsels of beef and cheese, drops of icy wheat beer, tethering him to your bone cold hand. He would follow you almost anywhere, even the dark backseat of a parked car in a suburban forest, the stunted trees unfurling and slumping toward earth.

You’ve got to do it right this time— spread a fine white cloth on the ground and lay his body out like a cross, all parts precise and erect. When you touch his head you erupt in heat, the odor of rosewater sweat and melted beeswax rising to steam the air. You become the worst kind of fool, letting the rope go slack so you can turn to watch him follow, stumbling over the sharp gravel of the path and your own earnest happiness. His anxious mouth and slick hair, the uncertain leash worn to gauze between your fingers, your foot hovering before the edge.

Senescence

Before Tio Ramonsito died, I made the drive to Cleveland to pick up my grandmother so she could see her older brother one last time. In my tiny car, the press of evaporated perfume, alcohol and hothouse flowers, the powder finish of eye shadow.

In the drab halls, the stench of shoe rubber and iodine. In the glass box of a room, the aura of sour breath hovered over a bruised body that was not my towering uncle who brought candies from the island in musty cardboard, dented from customs, my uncle who smelled of shoe polish and hair cream, orange blossom water splashed against his shaved neck.

Two years, and rot had crawled into his chest, blackened his organs. The skin sunk where I touched, premature decay on that pristine bed. My grandmother, body folded into a low chair by the wall, watched Ramonsito breathe.

His daughter lingered by the door— Brenda, black curls and lace collars in the yellowed photographs. She was now my mother’s age, a cousin with my father’s face and our same rounded shoulders. Her eyes slack, her mouth collapsed with grief.

I remembered my father next to her, captured at play in faded pictures, short pants and pudgy sun-dark arms. He is older now than Ramonsito was then, his uncle the invisible camera man coaxing a pose from two reluctant children.

My father, his salted hair, his usual pallor, a heart that stutters with age.

Nocturne

My husband arrives so late in the night, that even the rowdy students down the hall are finally silent, passed out from drink. It is the coldest part of the dark, but when we meet at the closing door the worn carpet is warm under our feet. He pads silent to the bedroom, leaves me to the last crusted pots I avoided all day.

From the kitchen I hear him changing clothes, the rattle of the belt buckle grating as it resurrects old phantoms of welts. I lean into the steam rising from the sink and tense my calves, arch my feet. I think of us twined on the faded couch, a mess of tangled legs and discarded socks, imagine his shoulders hunched over the stove on Sunday mornings, spatula in hand, ministering to pancakes with sleepy eyes. Tonight I was not the tender wife who lays out folded flannel pajamas and urges him to midnight snacks, too full of memory to take in anything, not his drying sweat or his work stories or the low rumble of his tired voice.

I close the day and water the plants, then douse the lights to stare boldly into the corners of our apartment where the waiting shadows watch me, lurking even here with all our happiness.

En Masse After “Turbulencia suspendida en el aire” by Angélica Rivera

She is surprised that no one mentions it— smoky balloon from a distance, but up close a rainbow cloud thundering above her head, or bouncing over the hood of her black car with barely enough room for her own body, going seventy-plus in a forty-five zone.

Over the years it accumulated forgotten things that rumbled behind the air bubbles— a Spanish hymnal, flyleaf stained with baptismal water, thrift store shoes that pinched, paid in cash.

Every gift of withered flowers, the sour slick on her thighs, bedtime stories for little brothers, oldies songs crooned over a little girl’s crib, and just the once, a single black eye.

A bloated goldfish with a half-rotted tail, the turquoise Beta gorging himself sideways into the swollen gills of swim bladder disease, all her daughter’s dead pets stinking of liquid shit or drab algae, caught in the turbulence and aching with potential for the certain fall.

At night, the slow drip tortures her awake.

Canini

There was a crowd around the body in the alley between the homes, a car with a shattered window. A man on the telephone with police mutters words about the heat, no water, and abuse. I thought it was a child until I saw the open maw, the lolling tongue. There were bits of glass in matted fur, and streaks of blood rotting in the cracks. An elderly woman spoke to me. Her voice rose and I nodded, staring at the twitching paw, the tiny curled nails

It was not a baby. It was not my baby. The ever-present worries of gas money and diapers stilled their rattling to let me wonder at a person who would let something love them and leave it to die. We stood in an circle in the shade of a house, sun-flushed, so close the skin of our arms tensed. A boy trickled water into the parched mouth, his sister fanned away flies with school folders. When the sirens down the street stirred our air, I detached myself and waited for my neighbors to let me pass.

In the Company of Vanths After “This place is not what they said it would be” by Romina Meric

After four consecutive sleepless weeks of puddling among stale bedsheets until the first milky light crawls across the ceiling, she begins to hallucinate.

There had always been shadows, the no-one’s voice echoing in empty rooms, but now beasts wearing women-skin press themselves against the perimeter of the bed, and their tucked wings, visible at side-eye, are a flash of pyre ash washing the walls.

She buys a potted passiflora, eats the leaves, wards the nightstand with five-cornered petals to feed ghost moths left in the wake. In the near corner it’s not her father’s face but his roaring beard bleeding into the floor.

The tall beast wears the bronze chariot key, watches her slip into an old gauze robe to wait one last time, thankful to any god that she won’t have to walk the whole way down.

Dussel Farm, October

A hundred booted feet trample the mud and straw to slush, and young boys stoop to roll pumpkins into straight lines, kicking aside rocks that stud the field.

No one seems to feel the cold’s needle teeth. The babies are bundled in fleece, distraught at the noise of tractors and dogs, wind blowing at the wood-slat bins of hard decorative squash.

Where there is grass there are leaves, paper jewels fluttering around in grey light. The craft cabin at the edge of the field is old but dry, walls filled with gourds sawed into small brown cups, and plaid-smocked scarecrows. Amid the rain-soaked hay bales and cornstalks, the fragrant, crated apples: Melrose, Honeycrisp, McIntosh, Jonagold.

Advice for Women Turning Into Their Mothers

When you slump awake in the morning, linger under the blanket pretending at sleep and even if your daughter knocks once, let her try twice more. Despite what parenting experts claim, you can navigate breakfast with blind eyes, twist curls into a bun as you rummage for keys.

Remind your family to clean their teeth, even the man trimming his beard, flecking bits over your clean sink and remember that no one remembers where they put an orphan sock, the other glove, your good scissors.

Make small talk with the bigots at the orthodontist. Greet the doctor like a peer in your father’s Spanish.

Take notes on the hand-crank for palate extenders, floss needles, fluoride rinses, the nurse’s technique.

Answer the phone when your mother calls. Call her back when you think of her graying face, her burnt black beans.

When old ladies at church ask about your apple pies, be stupid. Pretend you forgot your own recipe.

Ignore the shadows that hover at the periphery. Wear a red apron, accept gifts of rooster figurines.

No one will write you poems. You’ll have to grow your own bold marigolds with just the Midwest sun, or kill your second shefflera this year. You under water. You overfeed. You have leftovers stacked in the fridge that your family forgets to eat. Clean the dishwasher. Buy enough milk—more than you think you’ll need.

Deciduous Teeth i. After the trainee nurse tore holes in my arm to find a vein for the pitocin, my mother held me still against her, curled and trembling as the anesthesiologist slipped a catheter between two vertebrae. I tensed when my legs gave. She tells me I cried at the rupture, when gravity snared the muscles to tug me downward in pain. I bit my lips, chewed the inside of my cheeks to keep from tasting the tears that ran from her face onto mine. ii. Years later I found that my daughter had leached calcium from my body to grow her own small bones, her own crooked, little teeth. I was praised for my tolerance for hurt, my loose-hinged jaw, the way I stared down the needles of Novocain. I lost count of the root canals, bloodied floss, aching gums— each weak molar a dark mark, a hole of memory. iii. I have looped the waxed string around that first loose tooth, but my daughter refuses to let go. We are a family spectacle crowding the tiny bathroom. I have to coax her lips open to press my two fingers against her wriggling tongue and twist the milk tooth free. The sudden absence startles more than the fleeting pain, but I hold her against my body, let her wipe snot on my dress.

Her mouth is gaping, bloody, and in the pulp of empty space I see something pushing through, new and white.

Cultivar

The table properties of olives are directly related to the qualities of soil, sprouting dry from limestone crags or even clay, slow growing bodies twined. Twin arms bearing raw young fruit, a single arm reaching to pluck one from brine. Unripe the drupes are inedible, until salt replaces bitter, the unpleasant acids dissolved in solution, forming a ghost of the berry. The body is full of small workers, budders and pruners, pollinating feathery white flowers and pressing oil from the meat. Put the olive in your mouth. Put another olive in your mouth. Digestion is a process as unpredictable as yeast. The body performs erratic movements, spelling out names of ancient garden trees, a dancing rootstock damaged by frost, propagating wild seeds and forming whorled grain patterns. The pits rattle against teeth, consider germination or fermentation inside the small intestine, and later plan to be grafted together onto a hardier, fire-resistant host.

Beckwith Orchard, September

We join the crush of families weaving around hay bales, following the dirt trail in the grass. Train tracks intersect down the road, an unnatural border to the sprawl of orchard trees, a cornfield running parallel to the edge before it meets the woods.

On the other side of the farm there is a maze, guarded from deer who trample the weaker stalks of these lonely rows and loosen drying ears to feast at dusk. There are older buildings out between the trees, shredded paint flecking the ground, left abandoned and dank.

We consider walking into the shadow, leaving dappled sunlight to enter the dark. When I was my daughter’s age I lost my way in Appalachian woods, walked eight miles before they found me, thirsty and staggering through the brush. I was listening for voices calling my name, or the tittering of local birds, trying to memorize the patterns in curling bark to let the trees orient me and point a way out.

The apple trees are evenly spaced on the hills, their spindling arms pointed upwards, trunks tumored with clusters of ripening fruit.

My husband tries to identify the variety by shape and color, but at this distance one apple looks like every other, even in luster. I’d like to stop and lay flat on the earth for a while. I spent a night on a hill once with the first boy I loved, arms flush, shrouded in cloud. The moon hung low, large and bright in the inky sky.

I thought it might devour us. It has never been closer. I count my steps toward the buildings, consider how leaves change direction in the wind, exposing their silver

37 undersides and vulnerable veins. I lag behind, left in the last shadows of corn and trees. From the bend, I hear voices calling my name.

An Ancestral Function

It has been three years since I last ate quenepas, three years since I pierced a hard rind with thumbnail and slid the raw pith and seed into my mouth. Those tart little eggs, eating the corners of my lips with acid, pink as organs, deceptively floral before the blood. Quenepa cluster as a bouquet of ovaries, thin branches supple as the tendons holding a womb against the muscle wall. My uterus and its curving tree limbs, feels more vestigial than a repository for useless gut bacteria or the molar erupting with red infection, a poison shattering neighboring tooth and bone. I cannot hold one living thing before it sours. When I try to cultivate stone fruit and hardy flowers in this hothouse I begin a flood. Fickle growing season and the slow ripening, soft meat curling inside itself to pull away from the skin. When I smell lime and rose musk, I blush at how my tongue waters to remember those green berries shrink-wrapped in cloudy plastic, how they tumbled out as I gorged, delicate membranes of my mouth burning with sores as I kept breaking, kept eating, worrying each pit bare.

Pest Bird

My brother calls me for the first time since March. I consider walking to another room, but I stay and listen to his urgent voice that struggles for human words. The birds outside are distressed, calling for each other. He says he is doing well.

He sounds like a pigeon, bony and desperate. The calls echo from an open window, through my room. I can hear the squawking of his trashy wife in the background. She is in another tree, and sounds well-fed. Men arrive with lawnmowers to mow the lawn, and the noise startles local birds. The men mow under the trees, very thorough. My brother sounds far away, his voice straining to be louder, shriller. I cannot hear his wife anymore. The men are right by my window. Sweat pricks my skin as I listen to my brother’s distress. He is pecking at his human words. He drops the call. The men stop mowing. I walk away to another room.

Small-Island Endemic

They flock, a charm plunging down to peck curved bills to eat the tiny seeds, or loose-limbed flesh that bleeds when they feast, and between the hairs and scales they dig for mites that hide beneath and in those spaces, feathered, lives the lack of name, that creaks the pitted bones and urges flight into the wings, that breathes a puff of yolk, a shard of shell and imitation of teeth.

Vejigante

When you are a girl you linger after church to watch the boys jostle each other in dress pants, their sweaty hands rough against the ball, struggling to impress, shots looping loose and awkward toward the net. You sit by the hedge, let the big one slide himself toward you, nudging your leg with his knee and pressing his lips to your ear, whispering his abuela’s cuentos of men with stone hands and cucos climbing in through dark windows while you pretend at fear. At night you watch the last bit of sun fade into twilight on your wall, listen for the rattle of sea pebbles and salt. The adults claim you dream the end-times, a child witness to the demons that balloon from shadow, staring down dark corners to ride out the shiver and howl.

When you are a woman you learn to avoid looking slant at your reflection, features blurring as the mask dries, her purpling mouth wide and ravenous at your back. Your fingers trace invisible horns curling from your forehead, tissue paper and plaster, the curved coconut eyes. You expected more fire and wailing, more than the apocalypse bleeding out between your legs and the devil muttering at the edges of the bed. Sometimes you are bold, thick-tongued in horror, marveling at your own grotesque features in the mirror. Your human face is docile and grim, a veil stretched thin over what is monstrous— story made flesh, a hunger that thunders like an island drum, waiting to devour.

A Doughboy’s Equipment After Charles A. Meurer

He is not gone. The hats hanging from iron nails, the trumpet mouth, an empty canteen and the mud-stained sack that stinks of rum—they form an outline of absence. When a man can sit and rest his gun, that is what passes for home.

On the other side of the world his father wonders about the mail, fingering the edge of an envelope, his rough nail a white sliver of moon. Cows wait out the sun along the uncut hay, eyes as dull as a gas-mask stare.

No one said he’d have to clean his own knife. No one told him that some boys never learn to make a cigarette last the night. He keeps his boots on, takes a piss outside in the shadow, the smoke that followed liming his naked back.

El buey del mar

Seaside at the southern edge of the island in early afternoon, surf churning, erasing a shore made of rough sand and shell shards that chaffed at my thighs. Despite the wind whipping my face I stayed under the gnarled beach tree and waved to my family.

There was a handful of children in the water, their grandparents lounging by me. We chatted in lazy Spanish about Midwestern snowfall, sight-seeing in Ponce, good Chinese buffets, and what white Americans are like here. I was wondering, Do all puertorrican abuelos wear those pleated pants? then the woman screamed at something behind me.

I had never seen a crab so huge and tawny, his eyes large marbles, stalks swiveling as he scuttled sideways from his bolt hole among the roots. The old man lunged, clumsy shoes kicking up a cloud of sea grit in his rush to catch the skittering creature. He held it aloft for us to see, and then there was a crowd, bodies pressed up smelling of tostones, exclaiming over the snap of pale claws and the wriggle of the spindle legs, one guy repeating over and over, Si tiene huevos, sueltalo compai!

The old woman touched my arms, asked if I felt any fright. I said I should have known I was invading his home. Bullsheet, she said, gesturing at the boardwalk, the children splashing. Como si no fuera nuestra playa tambien.

Stephanie

Remember the buzzing in the church stairwell, how her father donned a dirty second-hand suit to harvest wood-bee honey from the crumbling wall, how everyone kept saying Jose, it’s not for eating even as they held jars of dark fluid up to the light and repeated their jíbaro stories like old drunks.

Her body anchored, thin metal rods woven under sinew and muscle, a mimicry of correction that wore through cartilage and seat cushions alike, and her mother’s hand trembling to lift spoons of rice to a gaping mouth, the sickness smell and perfume of carnations aged into the faded couch.

The knobs of bone under damp skin, her fingers that gripped at your hand, the wheel-tracked carpet, how you struggled for English words to explain the twisting of her limbs or why her tongue wrestled the air every time she tried to speak your name.

Remember her small head cradled to his shoulder, how her father pressed his face to her dry lips and held himself still against the jerk of her chin, how he whispered, Un beso, mi Estefanía, mi nena. Un beso para Papá.

Corpora

All my life my mother has undressed in front of me, casual in her motions after church or before a shower, rolling her shoulders like a waking cat, once feral. She’d toss her bra to a corner of the room where it would live, crumpled, until laundry day.

Even in the years that I measured myself by sips of water, apple slices, and the hollows of my jutting spine, I never looked away. I searched for an answer in my mother’s face— some armor against the litany of never enough, a reason to ignore what I could not change. But there was only her nakedness, the paunch of her belly, and the crows feet when she laughed. You’re my daughter, as she motioned to the ample flesh of her ass. One day you’ll have this too.

Just last week I sat on the bed as she changed, eyes mapping scars of childhood and failed surgery, the ashy knees, sagging breasts, an atlas of stretchmarks. She is older and slower than I remember— hands too stiff to style curls quickly going to salt, and every bend or crouch leaves a grimace. But it is hers, the whole heft of fat and muscle and bone that carried her through a lifetime of sadness.

In the right light, she looks out at me from the mirror— the same softened jaw, the wisps of frizzing hair, the dimples on my outstretched elbows. This is mine, the reflection an echo of my mother— her soft, dry hands and the hard eyes that know I must love this body, the only real home I own.

Crib Death After “Very Astrological” by Romina Meric

When she still dwelled in the swells of the new soft earth, before the solid plates of stone and ore fused shut the pewter gates of Death, she delivered a child, a slick blue-faced son smothered in caul, born at the knock-bone rib door of her uncle’s cavern home.

One shade kept watch for thunder, one held her as the water rush broke, anchored the womb to the dirt in a lake of blood and white flake. Then his gaping cryless mouth, the dry birth creasing the skin after months of ocean salt.

She left the boy in a stone-drip hollow, swathed in cobweb to hold him still, that infant breath a last payment. It was nightfall. She staggered upright, bundled the cotton with herb salves between her legs, and cupped her hands to carve a way out toward drier land.

Velorio

Wake is better. English punctuates in a way that we can’t manage, tongues echoing the Latin mother, voices wavering like votive flames. The church is near silent, mourners nestled and shrouded on benches or queuing to view the body, husk of an old woman coddled in wool. Breaths are staggered tonight, and any cleared throat will startle in us the tender guilt of living— shame and lament bloom inside, exhaled to mingle with the stench of rotting lilies and strong perfume. Earlier, I dressed in silence, only the whispers of covered legs, the rustle of a starched dress settling over skin. Outside, I wait alone in November night, trampling crimson leaves into the cracked stones of the walk, haunted by the pleased smile pleating the frozen flesh of her face, like a blessing resting on eggshell silk.

Residence Time

Call me when you get to the edge of the ocean, as soon as you stumble past shell shards and rock wall to falter feet-first into the grey. This season is not a popular time to visit the water. The locals grow grim whenever it is damp, pause before the crest of such a high place. I scribbled notes for you, a guide to navigate the boggy parts, spleen and circulation, wove you a kelp hat to hide you in the floating forest. Your underwater self is exactly the opposite of your overland self, but this sea is an experience quite adjacent to our lake, all brined funk and gravel, crust of salt on your lips. Don’t forget the rumble and flesh of your own face. Don’t come back from the waves with pinprick legs, voiceless and pining for a new wife. I told you I’d wait here at the shore. Men offer me hunks of fatty skin to chew through winter. Women teach me how to braid a rough net, raise frost flowers and anemones. The highlight of this lunar cycle involved finding a good hollow to hide from polar easterlies. I plan to build us a tiny house by the end of this solar year.

Cortejo

A coffin at the end of the room moves like a cloud, points his head after the setting sun. Darkly we murmur to the cask and shadow the corners, watching men come to heft the bulk and mortcloth on their graying shoulders. Open the procession to ice and music, the passage ruined now, lifted through thin light at the edge of the city—brick buildings and death pallor. A white wind despairs and stiff hands press against my aching limbs to stir the blood. Fresh earth loosens, powders our faces and the greystone tombs. How our feet shuffle graveward to the cadence of psalms.

Cold Working After “G’s Nose” by Robert Wick

My mother’s face rises from the earth, washed dry, growing juniper and white oak from the wells of her bronze eyes and nostrils, the corners of her sloped lips. At thunder, a voice tumbles against the chert sheared from cliffs into a sluice of rainwash. It draws the cows forward, dark specks roaming the red. They drink and sweat, tongue the scrub brush at the edge and bend their boulder heads to the dirt. The mothers lead the calves inward, sniffing the gullies for lingering salt. There is copper buried here, miles of mine under the rock layers, deeper than bones. The tunnels amplify the urgency of water, a mother’s voice—the ocean call humbled by distance and mountains, tugging my baked skin toward a homeplace, a white shore, the burnt stone formations a fractured circle of empty arms.

Savings Time in Autumn

Watching you in another room, I wonder what it is like to be so rooted and why you do not loosen yourself but shelter inside the lingering warmth of summer even as I chart the qualities of wintering light.

Show me how you field this hill, regarding all upheaval like a temporary mound of dirt. Show me where to cut to encourage a new growth. I think you let me bloom so I can break against myself, this heaviness a memory like a bell. The leaves and I turn toward the sun outside the fogged window. Smoke and cinder until I touch you, and the same after I mark your gift for naming me as opposite of my plant qualities—a sprouting and not the harvest. This mislabeling an end I can’t forgive.

Birthday

It is that time of year again, and again you do not ask for help with the counting, not even from the accountant whose job it is to take count of what you have, what you lack. Here are some numbers—you continue to demolish one pair of lungs, one genetically fatty liver, the ten small bones of your feet. Twenty steps from the old car to your rattling door, eleven parking tickets in two lots, two hundred and fifty dollars in fines. One new car, one new friend, eight unanswered emails. One living child, three unfertilized ovum flushed over three months. One dress size, five hours of sleep in one night, two cups of coffee on Tuesdays and Thursdays, one cup of coffee the other five days. Four versions of one haircut, ten new bottles of polish, three new pairs of shoes. Four living parents, two old brothers, two new small pets, one forty dollar increase in rent. How many deaths since you last checked? How much of this body leaked out in fluids, crumbled into flakes of dry skin? This year, no one bothers counting things you aren’t grateful for. They can count on your grim mouth to jumble words in either language, to crack in distress. At least it is dark in the winter and no one can see your mouth move as you practice your public speaking.

A Threshold after “Fate in Bloom” by Brian Fahlstrom

One evening the woman took a step backward and slipped into the liminal space between light touching an object and the shadow an object casts against the earth. A dissolution of vision, the rough coast lined with staggered houses, red shingles and clapboard echoing themselves. It is a new place. It is quiet without the gulls or rumble of civilization, only the pastel lapping of doubling ocean, and the slither of inky pools making their way toward the water. Her body is weightless, the air sturdy as a drum and still salted with spray. Islands and stone formations rise out of the waves like puckered knobs of bone. It is impossible to stand. She can’t walk back into the world even if she wanted to, but this town is a good place to float for a while, or settle.