New California Writing 2013

Thanks to the bilingual online news magazine, ChicoSol.org, my poem "California Was Never Kansas" will be published this spring in New California Writing 2013, which you can check out here: https://heydaybooks.com/book/new-california-writing-2013/. ChicoSol submitted the piece for consideration to the anthology last spring, and I recently learned that it had been selected for publication. This year's contributors include Joan Didion, Robert Hass, Gustavo Arellano, Susan Straight, and David Rains Wallace; needless to say, it is a huge honor to be featured in the same collection as these folks. My work hasn't been anthologized since I was 14, when my essay "Across the River" was published in Mexico, A Love Story, so it feels good to be experiencing the vulnerability that comes with sharing one's work again.

You can read the ChicoSol version of the poem here.

Ripe Brush

Roundabout on a day like this:

16^th of November coming and coming fast,

dizzy on the streets like fingers of a fan

Every day I walked to France and back,

Los Angeles gleaming at the corner

in Le Jacaranda, scentless lilac blossoms

long since dead and pressed but not velvety

(The day of that plaza passed

in rain dripping from the eaves of

bright cafés and pooling in

drunk desert tiles dipping with

the recollection of what it’s like to be a sea)

November’s scent was black palm soap,

the oil in my hair, sweat and sunscreen,

the French perfumes that clung to me in the new city.

November’s sound was the 6 AM call to prayer,

when you woke and brushed the edges of your feet

with a stream of water running fragile in the sink

You made circles around Koutoubia at sundown,

theorized the clicking of men’s tongues,

waited for me in the garden where I found you

after the roundabout on a day like this:

fumes drifting out from behind the airbag,

six thousand miles later, I said to you,

I think I need to get out –

Temple throbbing and you still smell like soap,

yet another garden heavy with brush ripe for wildfire,

trees yearning to burn,

up here August brings the

new year, scorched acres and

this scarred body,

flattened and withering,

begging like this summer’s basil to be brought inside

Suffocating September and burning flags in Casablanca,

day eleven of the month and four fires in California.

Insert, Reference, Footnote

* Nowadays, he thinks of her like an asterisk: substitution or addendum, blank-faced skeleton of a star where the letters of her name used to be. He doesn’t think of her often and pretending she is a vulgarity or an endnote – preferably something obscure, like a footnote within an endnote – makes it easy to forget her soft, taut body, made for birthing fairies and guerrilla warfare in the mountains of Bolivia. He does not like that she and California are assonant, too. He cannot rid her of that n-i-a. He cannot rid her of that extra feminine a. She and California share that last syllabic plateau and her feet are soft, like a rain-slicked boot. On those occasions when she makes an appearance, requires a glance, he squints his eyes, cocks his head a bit, thinks her ropes of hair are like ivy, parasitic and thirsty. His mouth is dry as he turns away. He thinks, "I couldn’t even read her handwriting."

Sequence

Here goes the thinker, my grandmother would say

when it was his turn in Sequence,

because our impulsive decisions

earned us nothing but

the tapping of her slender fingers

on the wooden wings of the table.

Waiting for my grandfather’s strategic move

was like coaxing clouds right there below Paradise.

The cube he built me to improve my spatial reasoning

did not make a difference:

I could never recline against a fencepost the way he did, a day’s work,

or watch the stock market, even once,

stand below the trees outside, and fix things:

a radio, a bicycle, a pair of eyeglasses.

It wasn’t more than a few weeks ago

that I stood at the foot of the bed,

and he asked me:

                           Are the fruit trees blooming?

Slight shake of my head, the tip of my glance on his tired eyes,

my grandfather never hunkered down like this;

if he were here, he would tell me now,

                          Turn on that light, if you’re going to read.

Water Dome

for Jazzi

snazzy peaches,
i am so far and with you

from those shards of sunlight on icy fields
on cycling mornings that must be getting colder,
from here it is hard to believe that they exist:
landscapes away, i can try to imagine
the smokiness in the air and the stars after six,
the persimmons in the market and the dry mouths they leave behind,
the seasoned almonds on the kitchen tables: orange cinnamon, coffee, honey and lemon,

or highway and
barbed wire and
flattened yellow grasses under slices of metal

but i lost your body here:
slow walk straight back deep breaths and i thought i had healed
on a misty evening, around cobblestones sinking in dirty water
we were hand-in-hand, coming from the Turkish bath
an old woman in an apron leaned against her doorway and told me I was beautiful –

what things we believe in and don’t believe in.
six thousand miles cannot be the same world,
i was so far, i did not believe the newspaper’s photograph,
but i believed after
the palm of my hand on cool tile,
a sign that read, “the most beautiful Arabic poetry,”
crying while I ate an apple,
a day somewhere between inshallah and inshallah,
smell of greasy meat at the end of my street and men still catcalling as she
put her arms around me,
the cat leaping to the edge of the clay pot to drink rainwater in the Andalusian garden,
the monkey in a red sweater at the end of a chain

every moment like the suspension
of a droplet of water
on the surface of a penny

snazzy peaches, i am re-reading Auden, the illusion of safety,
singing a lullaby in the room in Meknes,
domed ceiling, a tiled floor, a worn wooden bench
that I did not sit on because
a pretty rectangle had been carved out of the middle,
sensing the notes would burst, too full, overflowing,
finding your laughter in the faded indigo of that museum,
in all those things you made, could not have been without you

you were smiling in the aftertaste of smoke
in the glass of water I had this afternoon,
Yusef told me, a Moroccan specialty,
apparently it keeps scorpions away,
well, anyway,
i am believing
in all kinds of crumpled magic

since you have been so
far gone with me

Boat Under the Orange Tree

Under the orange trees,
he turned to me and said,
scratch that, all things are beautiful

could he feel
the kitchen table under my elbows,
the taut muscles of my father’s face
tendons like fists, then ropes
the wince, the rocking motion,
what an ugly thing
war is

fingering the dullness.
leaves of an olive tree,
a skirt that swallows dust,
a lime in a girl’s mouth,
skin stinging under fingernails
in the dives of birds over the orchard,
do I not love the world enough?

she is taking a little break from herself now.
her shadow has left the house now,
she cannot
hurt bodies
without it.
standing on a rooftop in Rabat,
she knows her shadow is the fog
fossilizing the city by evening

she has gone to retrieve it in the waves
that touch her like cotton
and recognize her skin, even the hem of her skirt
and she is trying to remember if God forgave the princesita
who stole the star in Darío’s poem. She thinks God did.
she wants to know if it is okay to take one from the tile
by the unfinished mosque

perhaps this is the limit of language.
beautiful does not witness
the nightmares of veterans who sleep with guns,
the pinky of a lynched man in a jar
on the shelf with the family heirlooms,

the way her voice rose and I was afraid it would shatter
when she was too still, and she said, so guess what?
guess what I saw washed up on shore yesterday?

beautiful had not been walking with her
when she had seen
the odd thing on the beach,
the panicked woman who pointed, who pointed and said,
I know what that is, I know what that is,
I study biology –
it is a human fetus,
that is a human fetus

her voice rose and I was afraid it would shatter
and under this orange tree,
there is the shape of the boat,
and the texture of the wood,
and I am wondering who was there if beautiful wasn’t

Sacred

I. Indigo

Paint your city indigo
and place it at the heel of the mountains,
at the edge of the rainforest

Name it
for the twin peaks like horns,
or for a saint,
and pave it with cobblestone

Make a quiet
rainfall
and a silky
fog lift
and a sun that will
breakthrough

to reflect
whitewashed indigo
like the freshwater of the lakes in Chiapas

Build a place for prayer
on a hill overlooking the city
a mosque, or a raft
and climb or glide, but do not swim
when you hear the call to prayer –

sometimes a marriage procession,
or the voice of the muezzin,
or a dancing boy and his tambourine

II. Rosary

Crammed between tables of Moroccan men,
in the outdoor seating of a café,
over a glass of mint tea,
I would like to tell you:

Civilizations do not clash in me
anymore –
perhaps they never did

I know I am not made of oil and water
because I am blurring continents, smearing oceans
with the edge of my left hand

I know I am café nusnus
because I am momentarily unsure
whether the woman in the mural
is a Muslim or a Zapatista,
because I am speaking Spanish to my African mother,
watching Mexican telenovelas in darija,
searching for Córdoba in Marrakech

My spine is a rosary
And I carry places like prayer beads.
Run your fingertips
down the middle of my back
and you will see that I am whole,
not split,
soft-skinned and another shade of coffee

you will be surprised,
as I still am,
at the length of my spinal column,
at the distance between vertebrae –
thirty-three places of origin,
and I have not returned to all of them yet

my birthplaces are cuauhnahuac,
close to trees,
sometimes named
for the horns of a cow or a goat,
but when you touch the curve of my spine,
you will see that I have emerged
from the city where it is always spring,
from the inside of an oak,
from a tree with purple bark in the mountains of Oaxaca

you can trace my roots
in the syllables of my last name,
listen to my father’s love of the earth
when I tell you who I am,
hear the sweat and soil whisper
that I am his daughter

and when you reach my sacrum,
and feel the fused bones,
you will understand why I cannot distinguish
between some of these places