RED FACTOR A thesis submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts by 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 ii 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 iv 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 v 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. vi 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. 1 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. 2 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? 3 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. 5 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. 6 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.