Holy

By Iliana Rocha

Irene Garza, 1934-1960

What matters is not what she confessed, but
what he heard: I will never be yours. Any incongruity,
violence the speed of light, lightning rage, desire punctured
 
by light’s split second, razor-sharp, sawtooth, light
knifing through the cathedral windows at the point past
lightning. The gray storm clouds of manhood
 
thundered through his hands, she died by them, & this poem
will go no further—no familiar detour casual
in its delivery—to describe the violence, unabridged.
 
What mattered, the locals said, was her beauty,
her silhouette tortured by the decade in which women
were being built & rebuilt, especially if she happened
 
to be Latina. A purse, shoe, & lace veil—the necessary
paraphernalia of femininity gone dark
into a canal. In the center of every horrible geography,
 
there is a man named John we run from, but the map
grows legs to follow us, the map pools
& lakes, oceans into an ocean to drown us, despite
 
attempts to drain the Gulf of Mexico from the folklore.
I think of all the women buried in bodies of water.
I think of the water prophetic in its churning.

liana Rocha is the 2019 winner of the Berkshire Prize for a First or Second Book of Poetry for her newest collection, The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez, forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Karankawa, her debut, won the 2014 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). The recipient of a 2020 CantoMundo fellowship and 2019 MacDowell Colony fellowship, she has had work featured in the Best New Poets 2014 anthology, as well as The Nation, Virginia Quarterly Review, Latin American Literature Today, RHINO, Blackbird, and West Branch, among others,and sheserves as contributing editor for Waxwing Literary Journal. She earned her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University and is an incoming Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Her three chihuahuas Nilla, Beans, and Migo are the loves of her life.