And Herophilus[1] in Alexandria what did he know of this? He who gazed not out but in to the body, compelled not by the whole but by the part?
***
The woman cannot find her tongue, cannot use her brain to make it dance. She was a pastor, quick witted and this loss is hard to bear. Her family draws close to her hospital bed as she stares, bewildered, stranded in her mind her tongue holding nothing but air.
***
As I test her oculomotor nerve, she squeezes my free hand, her eyes searching– beautiful, wild, hungry, like the waves of Reynisfjara. Her daughter tells me she thinks this is a curse moving fast through her mother’s body. I know little of curses but much of loneliness. Even then, I could see her begin to learn the language of unspoken yearning, the language of unbounded desolation. To taste the lull and urgency in the silver morning as only few of us can.
[1] Greek physician known for being the first to scientifically dissect cadavers. He was the first to describe the hypoglossal nerve, that which is responsible for tongue motor function.
Alex Quintanilla is a Mexican-American doctor and writer. She graduated from Rice University with a BA in English then spent a year teaching in Spain. Afterward she attended medical school and completed residency in Texas. She’s currently a pediatrician in Houston where she shares her love of reading with patients whenever she can. Her poems have been published in Scalawag and The Florida Review’s Aquifer.
My grandmother did not want my wife to curse me like she did her patrilineage each time she made rice in the caldero. No hexes, no dark cloud forming in response to where’s my dinner? Her first grandson would feed the family. Pork shoulder passed through time with a Puerto Rican DeLorean. Not Marty but Martí. She taught me picadillo first ‘cause it was easy. Beef and a lil onion and a lil olive and some tomato sauce and then the rest of it. Así, let it brown. She never planned to do anything but cook for me as a thank you for being alive, but I was to keep the food even when she left. My friends would love me for my sancocho and the girls would, too. Not one for witchcraft but my sazón would cast a spell. Call the hood back from the fire hydrant at 7 o clock, keep meat on her great grandkids’ bones, give their mother the day off. Her neck would not hurt and no one would resent her boy. There would only be reasons to love me.
Grandpa went to Vietnam. Each of his sons was to soldier. To make a war where there wasn’t. When he put down the machine gun he weaponized his tongue and let acid rain. Because he burned jungles to be here. He brought me Hot Wheels whenever he visited long after they divorced so that I would thirst for the constant explosion of eight eager cylinders. He wanted to help raise a macho with bravado-scented arm hair to call to the mamis from the Corvette he kept himself with the oil streaks to prove it. A provider who gave nothing else up. The day I turned seventeen I deserved my Heineken and a hot plate from my woman when I got home.
Grandpa asked me if I had a girlfriend every time and grandma said Ay, Claudio with sucked teeth. Leave him alone. And they both laughed at a good thing to bicker about. He wanted me jolly. Big belly and bass. A bandana. A little-bit-drunk smile. They had different ways of getting there. I was to turn the stones they gave me in my hands until they smoothed. Now I’m soft and I love men and fast cars and to sweat over my own meals. That works for them.
Devonaire Ortiz is a Puerto Rican-American poet from the Bronx. He now lives in Brooklyn, NY.
A is plain. Á is the same, as A but more striking: ce-a-RÁ :: a-NA-pho-ra a-NÁ-li-se :: a-NA-pho-ra
à and  are equal in phonetics but not in placement. They are low moans, a dense steel door in your throat to croak open uhhhhh at-lân -ti-co :: un-til ma-çã :: son :: un-do
When my mother learned of the new woman in her life, she groaned the Ô in her name for months: Mô-ni-ca :: moans
When my father spent the divorce blaming my mother and Mô-ni-ca all he could say: vo-cê :: e-ve-ry-thing vo-cê :: em-pty
When I told the social worker I was hungry from not being fed she said aww which sounds like Ó but not quite, like a slant rhyme of plain/same, yet audible in tone vo-VÓ :: AWE Ó-leo :: OPT-i-mal
Still, nothing is more testament to Portuguese than the lh, a rolling off the tongue, not unlike the Spanish trilled rr, not unlike the slick hills of parental abandonment. For this one, you must tickle the roofs of your mouths (like father tickled Mô-ni-ca’s) and expand.
And release. fi-lha :: a-lea fi-lho :: in lieu of
Arnaldo Batista graduated from Florida International University with a degree in Physics and Interdisciplinary Studies. He’s a queer, polyglot, dog-loving, Gen Z Miamian poet with a passion for all things beautiful, hoping to use his craft to amplify the diminished voices across the world. Arnaldo Batista’s work is forthcoming in Lucky Jefferson’s literary journal and Florida State Poet’s Association 2020 anthology and is also a finalist for Gival Press’s Oscar Wilde Poetry Prize of 2020.
Abandoned
furniture marks my daily walk to the bus stop — coffee tables with missing
legs; a mattress with a piece of paper on it that reads “NO, bed bugs.” A
warning to anyone who might want to drag it home.
A
black leather couch bakes in the sun. The ghost of someone’s imprint remains;
teeth marks on half a sandwich, a rotting relic.
These,
the only indications of chaos on a block that goes quiet after dark. I often
lie in bed and marvel at the silence. There’s no buzz of helicopter
blades, no laughter or clink of bottles from people outside, no drivers racing
by with the music so loud they set off the alarms of parked cars. My childhood
neighborhood, 14 or so miles away, lingers over me — a blueprint projected onto
this new apartment, superimposed over its walls.
*
Stereotypes
and fears about my childhood neighborhood abound, even outside of Los Angeles.
In a San Diego cafe, I sit sipping tea and reading while a family eats at a
table nearby. They chat about what areas of L.A. they plan to visit.
“Don’t
go to Compton,” one of them says. “And don’t go to East L.A.? Or where is that?
South Central L.A.? The southern area of L.A.”
The
area where my family has lived for the past 29 years. South Central Los Angeles is rife with
history. To me, it’s every crisp bite I’ve take into the tang of sour cream and
saltiness of cheese layered on top of the elote we just bought from the man who
walked by with his roving food stand. It’s the smell of the panaderia on
Sunday, the rustling of the paper bag as I peek inside to choose my favorite
piece of bread. It’s the sound of drums in Leimert Park.
The part of the city that people say to avoid is the only home I’ve ever
known. Against exceptional odds, Black and Brown people raise their families
here.
I
pack up my things and leave the café, not wanting to hear more about what other
people have to say about where I grew up.
*
People
seem happy when I tell them that my boyfriend and I are relocating to Glendale
next, but they warn me to keep an eye out for one thing: the erratic drivers. I
don’t understand the concern. Drivers in L.A. thrive on lawlessness on the
road, all zig zags and lead feet on the gas pedal. Pedestrians know their
safety doesn’t come first.
An
Uber driver tells me, “I never walk with my kids in Glendale.”
Another
says, “I had a passenger who was a tow truck driver, and he said they have a
lot of business on this side of town.”
These
are the stories we tell before we even get to a place.
*
On
a sunny weekend afternoon, I cross the street at an intersection with no light
— just a painted crosswalk, a mere suggestion that most drivers ignore
– and a car lurches towards me. I wait for it to register my presence and
crawl to a semi-stop before screeching off again. But it doesn’t stop, and it’s
coming faster than I expected. I brace myself for impact. I dig my feet into
the ground and put my palm out just as the driver brakes.
The
middle crease of my hand plants itself right in the center of the car’s hood.
The driver screams, her windows still up. I walk away, shaken. My palm hurts
for the next couple of days. I wonder what would’ve happened if she didn’t stop
in time. When I was younger, I’d sometimes imagine I would die by getting shot,
either by a stray bullet or a purposeful one because I looked at someone the
wrong way in our neighborhood.
I’m
shaken by the encounter with the car, suddenly aware of my mortality, no matter
where I might live.
*
My
mom once threw herself over my car seat as bullets whizzed past while my dad
was driving. When I took the bus with her as a pre-teen, fights sometimes
erupted inside.
I
grew up hearing about gang initiations and street muggings, warnings against
walking in the street. I only walked in the daytime. Once, a man pulled up to
the sidewalk trying to convince me to get in his car, but instead just handed
me his CD after I politely declined. Another time, a woman screamed “Hey!” behind
me, and my shoulders tensed instinctively; she told me that my skirt was stuck
inside my tights.
During
a walk to the library, a man gently picked up a butterfly off the ground,
placed it in his hand, and talked to us about its beauty. My mom and I took it
as a sign from my father who died that year.
You
never know who you might encounter on the city’s streets.
My
partner asks me to take a stroll late one night in Glendale and I scoff. We
don’t do that where I grew up. He says he walks around our new neighborhood at
night all the time, often after I’m asleep. I reluctantly walk with him,
instinctively scanning the street for danger and watching the shadows behind
us. But nothing happens.
*
Except
one day, there’s a stabbing in neighboring Pasadena, close to where my mom
works. I start noticing more spray painted phrases on the sidewalks outside my
apartment. The storage space above our assigned parking spot — inside a gated
parking lot — is broken into, some of our belongings stolen.
In
the middle of the night, a man yells loudly, his voice ripping through my heavy
layer of sleep. My heart pounds against my throat as I open my eyes. For a
moment, I don’t feel safe anymore. Home, and this new neighborhood, don’t seem
all that far apart anymore. The two threaten to overlap, like the blue and red
of anaglyph 3D colors coming together to show a new, vivid image.
*
Four
of the yellow trumpet flower trees on our block have bloomed. Shocks of yellow
against the gray of the concrete. Eventually they wither up and fall to the
ground, husks of their ebullient selves in full bloom.
I
take photographs of these trees on our block just like I snap portraits of the
woozy palm trees in South Central L.A.
Nature
doesn’t realize how we separate things. We construct those borders ourselves.
Eva Recinos is an arts and culture journalist and non-fiction writer based in Los Angeles. Her essays have been featured in Catapult, Electric Literature, Remezcla and more. She was recently a finalist in the Blood Orange Review 2020 Creative Nonfiction contest and the Center for Women Writers 2020 International Literary Awards (Nonfiction). She is less than five feet tall.
My hands lifted dirt on this earth since birth. La Ala, marker to place the ballpark. Where I’d trail fly balls over right field grass. Later, a steel teetering beam, snapped bone, as David played shortstop and mother kept score. I wasn’t grounded, I soared on couch or around the room wearing down the cast’s heavy bottom, an area red-lined as dim as the blinking light of our mounted-wing. One could say this was the birthplace of planes. A point in time, a man leapt from this hill. Math in a glider. The first wing-controlled flight. Aired success. A full circle. He saw the land, the Pacific blue; was boundless.
Gabriel Rubi is a SoCal native. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Diego State University. He lived and died in video games, but now he is a father and husband afraid to die. He is a poet, translator and non-fiction writer. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Poetry International, Gulf Stream Magazine, The Shallow Ends, The Indianapolis Review and elsewhere. Gabriel Rubi is a 2017 Intro Journals Project Winner.
The vagrants joked
that the hostel was one stop away from the shelter—and when the college kids
weren’t around—they would get real mean; “Jo’s headed to the shelter. Next
stop: A cot downtown, then a cold park bench!” They cackled, flashing open
mouths with missing teeth, wishing more misfortune on me, wanting me to fall
with them. I landed among their unpleasant company because I arrived in New
York earlier than scheduled, but a wild blizzard hit, and the boy who invited
me to stay with him was stuck out of town. And so, my new life was waylaid. I
ignored the howling men, set up camp at the local pay-per-hour computer, and
started looking for an attractive mark. I hit up a kid named Ryan in a chat
room, told him that I was from Los Angeles. He must have thought I was a
traveling college kid, and I definitely let him think that.
I
dragged my rolling luggage through the snow, creating a long trench from 137th
street to 150th in search of Ryan’s place. I needed a bed and a computer to
start my new life, to find a job, to get money, to find an apartment. Freezing
water bit down my gloveless fingers and seeped into my shoes. I knocked on his door
and an awkward white boy with shaggy hair answered.
“Jo?”
he said.
“Ryan?
If you have heat, I’ll kiss you.”
“Take
your shoes off and I’ll get a towel for your bag.”
“Thanks,
but I really just need a hot bath. Ya mind?”
Ryan
chirped a little laugh as if to express reluctance but I ignored it and powered
past him into his apartment. I stripped to my skivvies, grabbed a towel from
Ryan, and wrapped it around my waist. I walked around the place until I found
the nearest bathroom. It was painted a shade of yellow the color of sand on a
bright sunny day at the beach, with a single window behind the tub where the
gloomy blue grey sky peered in, and a mountain of snow made itself snug outside
the window sill. There was grime you could probably carbon date to the 1800s. The
tub was old-fashioned—downright ancient. Four little legs lifted the tub off
the ground suspended like a large dirty hollow oval egg. I was used to communal
showers so it was perfect.
I
found the hot water valve and the drainer. I started filling the tub and the
hiss of hot rushing water fused with the sound of the wind outside. When it was
full, I let my underwear fall, dropped it right on the dirty floor, and my
towel fell too. I slithered into that hot water like a snake in a swamp. My
head was soaked in steam and my sinuses cleared up immediately.
“Ryan!”
I called after a while.
“Y-Yes?”
The kid was nervous.
“Get
in here,” I commanded.
Ryan
entered the bathroom and observed me. He was tall with lips bigger than I would
expect on a white guy. He had a few pockmarks on his face like leftover scars
from his high school years. His most striking feature were his sad blue forgiving
eyes. I lifted my legs out and over the rim of the tub, and I let them hang.
“There’s
room down there,” I said. And I slid mouth-first into the water, more awkward
than sexy, but he got the gist.
He
undressed and slid into the tub in the space between my legs. His skin floated
up against mine and our bodies intertwined. Some more hot water fell over the
tub. His fingers grazed my skin, and my hands guided him onto my body. One body
was hungry, instinctively wanting to be fed, the other body giving.
I
lifted my waist above water. He wrapped his fingers around my back and devoured
my cock. I let him suck me off as I leaned my head to the side of the tub
looking towards the door. I pictured his roommate wandering in, screaming in
horror. This sort of stuff could only ever happen in secret, away from the
prying eyes of polite society. Ryan vigorously jerked me off. My hips dipped
underwater. I held his gaze and my sperm floated from the tip of my dick
towards to the surface of the water, rising up like a white eel and blooming.
I
felt a flush of embarrassment, so I unplugged the tub. It all hadn’t played out
as romantically as I had hoped, but it seemed to have worked on him
nevertheless. He sat up, hypnotized, and planted a kiss on my lips.
“Let’s
go to your room,” I said, partially because I wanted to finish him off, but
mostly because I wanted to see where I would be staying.
The
ornate touch of the main hallway, with their primary colored walls and junk,
gave way to Ryan’s minimalist bedroom, a mostly barren four-by-four square
room. If you were to walk into that apartment you would think whoever owned the
place had taken in a vagrant and stuffed him into a closet. He lay on his small
bed, and I followed on top of him. I took his hard penis into my mouth and
started probing him with my tongue and hand. Ryan moaned and held my head.
After a few seconds of this he spoke.
“I
want to fuck you but I don’t have a condom. Do you have one?”
“No,”
I answered.
“Well…if
you went downstairs and bought a condom, I could fuck you.”
I
stopped and looked at him.
“You
don’t have to do me any favors.” I said.
I
peered around his room while doing the old deed. The only thing on the barren
walls was a poster of Rufus Wainwright who looked down at me like some
benevolent God. It didn’t look like he approved of what I was doing, or maybe
how I was doing it. A modest book case stood in a corner of the room taking up
far too much space full of musician’s biographies, sheet music, and playbills.
His only other possession of note was an electronic keyboard near us with a
stool in front of it, ready and waiting to be used.
Ryan
blew his load in the air and between my fingers. There was a great display; hip
thrusts, moaning, and a flush of red on his face. I thought to myself that I
might have swallowed had he not selfishly suggested I go out and find condoms
in a snowstorm.
He
got up to dry himself with a washcloth which he tossed to me. I dried my hands and
excused myself to go to the bathroom, but I used that time to snoop around
instead. The only other bedroom was painted a deep lipstick red. The furniture
in this room was different than the rest of the apartment; every inch of it had
a gold tint trim and tacky old decorations like a large golden phonograph. I
opened the first drawer I saw next to the tall bed. A folded five-dollar bill and
some loose change lay inside. I felt an intense guilt as I took some of the
money and closed the drawer.
Five
dollars could buy a lot of things; toothpaste, hand sanitizer, hell–even toilet
paper, but most important of all, it bought time. I had a checking account with
money to last for two months if I was as cheap as possible. I re-entered the
bathroom and placed the five-dollar bill into my pants that lay next to the egg
tub. I washed my hands, and dried my wet black hair back into its natural
curlicue state, and returned to Ryan’s room with my clothes in my arms.
He
was sitting up on his mattress, and I joined his side. He started to ask me if
I liked Rufus, Tori Amos, if I knew about Sondheim, and I told him I had no
clue what he was talking about, that I was from the hood—a slip of the
tongue—his eyes narrowed and I figured he started to suspect that I was no
traveling college kid. He stared at me, put his fingers on my face, and told me
that one of my eyes was bigger than the other.
“Never
heard that before,” I said.
“It
makes you look like you’re always up to something.”
“Now
that one I’ve heard.”
I
thought Ryan would take advantage of me, but turns out he was a nice kid, not
too pushy. In fact, I started to feel bad about the situation. He didn’t expect
more sex, and he graciously made room for me in his small bed for the next two
days. Each night we slept with our arms around each other like brothers and in
the morning, he showed me a compassion
that I hadn’t earned.
“I
love this album, listen.” Ryan put on Poses
by Rufus Wainwright. A doleful
voice filled his little room and drifted through the old apartment. Ryan played
some tracks for me on his keyboard, mimicking the tracks on the album, and he
sang. His voice was light but rawer than the recorded song. He wasn’t singing
to impress me, or to charm me, he was just singing to sing. People in New York
just liked doing that, oftentimes with no expectation of feedback or reward. It
was joyous but also melancholy, because I knew Ryan was a struggling
singer-songwriter wasting away in a closet, and I wanted him to win, but
everything seemed so dour about his life. I felt like barnacle attached to his
room buying some time until I’d be swept off into a deep ocean current, but
together we made the room warm, and he at least had someone to sing to.
When
Ryan left for his day job, I left with him, to explore a New York buried in
snow. I enjoyed wandering with my hands in my pockets, watching my breath turn
to steam like smoke stacks out of a dragon’s mouth. Deadly black ice formed on
the sidewalk and I learned how to jump over pools of ice water from watching
the natives.
In
South-Central LA I couldn’t get around like I could in New York. The wealthy in
Los Angeles had left us a long time ago, left behind a mess of broken fences
and fields of weeds and dust. In New York the rich couldn’t move away, it was
too compact. I could walk into their neighborhoods and their stores—harass them
if I wanted to—pretend to be them, and then just as quickly run back to a more
modest part of town without them knowing who I was.
I
got home earlier than Ryan the next day and found his copy of To Kill A
Mockingbird. Ryan caught me thumbing
through the book, told me it was his favorite, and asked me if I liked it.
“Yeah…”
I said, briefly wondering if I could lie to that face of his, but I settled on
telling him the truth: “…Never read it.”
He
looked uneasy. I felt an almost instinctual urge to protect him from my own
opinion.
“Reading
books wasn’t my thing. I preferred music.” I said, and that was a lie, because
I had preferred nothing.
“Well.
That’s interesting; I always thought books and music were the same. Both have
rhythm and revelation.”
Ryan
smiled, and I mimicked his smile. He went on to play a song without hesitation.
I liked Ryan, but more importantly I couldn’t afford to reveal anything about
myself that would cause him to not like me.
Two
more days passed and Ryan and I carved out a mock domestic routine. He would
work, I would tidy his room, pillage his roommate’s room, take change, loose
bills, small jewelry, and then I’d go out, enjoy the day, and trade some stuff
at the pawn shop. The money went back to us, to supplies, food, maybe some
gifts for Ryan’s barren shoebox room. He assumed I bought everything with my
own money, and I let him assume that. I figured I’d be out of there before she
arrived, and she owned so much junk that I was sure she wouldn’t miss the few
things I took. I was telling myself it would be alright, but the longer I
stayed with Ryan, the more apparent it was that I was only fooling myself. He
never asked where I came from because he knew the story, we all did; you get
run out as soon as you don’t fit into someone’s picture. It’s why I never asked
about Ryan’s past because I knew it; all stuffed into his box a little too
excited about his piano and his Sondheim. New York was a city full of runaways.
The
door handle sprung to life one late afternoon while Ryan was at work and I was
using the living room computer to message my original host. In walked a
statuesque young woman, long flowing blonde hair falling over her face and
everywhere like dangling coils, wearing black gloves that held onto books and
binders, and a nice-looking coat in the fiercest shade of red. From the photos
in her room I gathered she was a part-time Barbara Streisand impersonator. We
had a brief staring competition that she won.
“Who
the hell are you?”
“I’m
a guest of Ryan’s, who the hell are you?”
“I
live here.” She said this with a natural authority, and I clucked my tongue at
her to dismiss it.
She
let the door slam, and started wandering around the place as if it was full of
bugs. She raced to her room while stomping her heels, and from there she asked
no one:
“Has
anyone moved my stuff?”
And
all I could do was lean back in my chair and smile: Points for perceptiveness.
I could hear her rummaging through her stuff in her room, and when Ryan
arrived, she sprang into action.
“Ryan!
I go on tour just one time—chrissakes—and now stuff in my room is missing. What
the hell is going on? Who is this?”
But
before Ryan could answer, I jumped out of my chair.
“I
told you who I was, lady, are you deaf?”
“Are
you kidding me?”
I
kept Ryan to my back, waving a hand to his face, because it seemed like he
wanted to say something, and I could only guess it was to grovel, to promise we
would pay her back. I wasn’t in the mood to play victim.
“You
own an awful lot of stuff, are you overcharging Ryan for staying here? Doesn’t
seem like a fair split.”
“Whoever
you are, you’ve been stealing my shit! You’ve been using everything in the
bathroom, my shampoos, my toothbrush! If you don’t leave, I’m calling the
cops!”
“Real
original lady, call the cops on the brown guy.”
She
stormed off, fuming, and I could hear her dialing 911 on her phone in the
bedroom. That was my cue. I packed my only belongings back in Ryan’s room; a
set of self-help books I stole from my uncle, all black clothing, and my
mother’s Spanish bible. I zipped my bag, and bounded out. Before leaving I told
Ryan to tell the police the truth, that he didn’t know anything about my
stealing.
I
skedaddled; out into the early winter night, with my rolling bag scraping
cement and water. The snow was starting to melt in Harlem and it was a great
struggle to reach the subway without slipping on ice.
“Jo!”
I heard behind me. I looked back and saw Ryan running down the block.
“Jo,
I wanted to give you something before you left.”
He
handed me an old Walkman of his, dented and scratched, along with some
headphones and a blank CD. I wondered why he was being so nice to me on account
of how much trouble I’d put him through.
“What’s
this for?” I said.
“I
was always planning on giving you this. You told me you liked music…Consider it
a thank you for sticking up for me back there. She does overcharge me on rent.
I know it.”
He
hugged me, and I was paralyzed, only able to move a few moments later after he
was gone and the sound of police sirens shook me awake. I bounded into a nearby
subway station with visions of the old men in the hostel howling in my head,
taunting me, telling me I’d end up back there and eventually on the street.
I
put my headphones in my ear and put Ryan’s CD into my Walkman. Sweet familiar
music started playing, Rufus Wainwright started singing. Ryan had burned the
album Poses for me.
I
listened to track seven, Grey Gardens,
on repeat while the train hurtled downtown. My host had returned the night
before but I didn’t leave immediately when I heard the news. I don’t know
exactly what kept me with Ryan, but whatever it was it was gone now. I could
never go back, not to Ryan, not to the hostel and the faces of the leering men,
not to California, and not to that awful place that I once called home.
K. Joffré is a gay Guatemalan-American writer happily married in New York. He has non-fiction published in Slate and fiction published in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Spectacle, Cosmonauts Avenue, and elsewhere. He hosts a podcast called “Writing Is Annoying.” He is currently on the hunt for an agent. You can find him on @kjoffre_ and at kjoffre.com
Surf Drive, 7 around the pandemic table, sobre mesa every night, with the girls growing up, with partners and baby now.
Born on day 27 of year 1957, after God made the universe by day 7 to rest in sacredness and spiritual perfection. Could I be perfect?
En la charada cubana, the 7 is a shell or Yemaya, la Virgen de Regla. I used to play the piano scales, in Western music based on 7 notes.
Light passed through a prism splits into 7 parts. In the Bible, 7 appears more than 700 times without counting sevenfold, 70 or 700.
In Confucianism 7 is a combination of yin and yang and 5 elements: metal, wood, water, fire and earth, together in harmony in Taoism.
Every 7 years changes occur in the body. We have 7 bones in the face, neck, and ankle and 7 holes in our head. There are 7 crystal systems.
My fifth, throat, chakra, one of the 7, is definitely unbalanced, or maybe it’s my third-eye. I will write these words in turquoise and sing them later.
The 7 colors of the rainbow, the 7 days of the week, a prime number. Seven used to be siete, which sounds like cielo; I was siete in San Juan.
At siete, I didn’t understand how far I would travel from my prime; we have composed a new melody, under watch of the Seven Sisters.
Carolina Hospital has authored Key West Nights and Other Aftershocks and Myth America, a poetry collaboration with Maureen Seaton, Holly Iglesias and Nicole Hospital-Medina, both by Anhinga Press; as well as The Child of Exile: A Poetry Memoir (Arte Público Press), and the novel A Little Love, under the pen name C. C. Medina (Warner Books); Her work has appeared in publications, such as the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature and Bedford/St. Martin’s Florida Literature.
How long have you been
experiencing this displeasure?
Why are you crying?
What color would you use to
describe your pain?
Do you drink frequently?
How do you personally define
frequency?
What drugs are you interested in
trying?
Describe the WebMD search results
that best align with your symptoms:
Medical History: Are you under treatment or have you been treated for any of the following?
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Shelby Pinkham is a queer, Chicanx poet who has called three Central Valley cities her home: Bakersfield, Stockton, and now Fresno. She has served as an assistant editor for The Normal School literary magazine, as an assistant editor for Rabid Oak, and as an editorial assistant for the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry book contest. She currently studies poetry as a second-year MFA student at Fresno State. Her work is forthcoming in bee house journal.
The woman who’d bought the
storage unit in which our father had stashed our mother’s urn was in her late
forties. Her living room was full of dreamcatchers, so many we had to duck
around them to get in.
“We paid good money for that
unit,” she said. “The lowest I can go is a grand. Frankly, there isn’t much
else in there we could sell to recoup our loss.”
“We don’t have a grand,” I
said. “And even if we did, we shouldn’t have to pay you. What kind of person
are you, anyway?”
The woman said, “If it was so important
to you, you should have kept paying rent on the thing.”
“You know what, forget it,”
I said. “It’s just ashes, anyway. It’s not like it’s her.” I stood up, but
Martín, my brother, grabbed my arm.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry to be nosy but, I
noticed you’ve got a lot of dream-catchers. Are you by any chance Native
American?”
“Hell no,” she said,
giving us a weird look. “I hang them up for my parakeets.”
*
We went back out to the car and drove to a McDonald’s around the corner. It was almost Christmas, and the air was so cold it burned.
“What tribe were you going to say
we were from, exactly?” I said to Martín, putting two sugars into my coffee.
“I didn’t know what I was doing,” Martín said. “You know how Mom was about that Indian stuff.”
I thought of Mom, drunk in our
kitchen, pointing at her hairless legs, her nonexistent eyebrows, and saying,
“Look at me! Look at me and tell me I’m not Indian!”
But Mom wasn’t close with her
family. We’d never been to Nicaragua. The only person who showed up for the
cremation was a straight-backed elderly man we’d never met before. He turned
out to be her half-brother.
“I just thought, you
know, maybe we’ll get a break for once,” Martín said.
“Us? Yeah right.”
“You know, we could just
give her the money,” he said.
“Except we don’t have it.
And anyways, no. We shouldn’t have to. That’s beyond messed up.”
“We may not have a choice.
She’s just mad that there wasn’t anything in there worth a damn.”
“Then she shouldn’t
have paid so much.”
“It’s like gambling. They
don’t know what’s in there. It was a big unit, pretty much everything from the
old house. She probably thought there was a lot of good stuff in there that she
could turn around on eBay.”
“She didn’t reckon on Dad’s
taste,” I said. My mood darkened. “Speaking of whom. Why didn’t he pay the
rent on it? How much could it have been?”
“Well, that’s
Dad.” Martín sipped his coffee.
I looked away. There was a group
of kids at the next table. One girl, maybe five years old, had three ketchup
fingerprints on her peachy cheek. It reminded me of those two months after I
dropped out of community college, when I lived with Stevie in the mountains—our
lost weekend, Stevie called it. One night we got really high and opened up cups
of chocolate pudding and dabbed it on our faces like warpaint and recited Emily
Dickinson poems to each other in growls. That was before we got bored and
started going to our sketchy neighbor’s parties.
And then Martín called. I came
home and started working again, figuring that Mom dying was the worst thing
that was ever going to happen to me. And then a year later Dad drops this bomb
on us, in his harmless-bumbling-old-red-neck way. Yeah, he couldn’t make the
payments on the unit. Yeah, they’d been sending him letters, something about an
auction. And what was in the storage unit? we’d asked. Anything important?
And all that time we thought he
was keeping the urn somewhere in his bedroom, to be near to her or something.
Yeah right.
“So, what’re we going
to do?” Martín said.
I hunkered down in the booth. “Fuck, I don’t know. I
guess we’ll have to raise the money. Ask people we know.”?
“I think we’ve begged enough
people for help this year, Jacky,” he said. “Anyways, we have the money.”
“I don’t know what the hell
you’re talking about,” I said. Inside, I was cowering like a roach,
waiting for the slipper to come down.
“How much you got put
away?” he said softly.
“Don’t even think about
it.”
“There’s a bank around the
corner. Why don’t we just get the money so we can get out of here?”
“Why don’t you eff
yourself.”
After a few seconds, he said, ”It
would only take you a few months to save up again. I’ll help you out.”
I hated it, but my eyes began to
water. I was saving to move to the city. The grand I’d scraped together over
the last year, in between helping Martín with rent and paying down Dad’s credit
card debt, was my ticket out. Enough for a deposit and one month in a shared
house in some cheap, slightly dangerous neighborhood, and a little extra to get
me to my first job. I wasn’t going to give it up, not even for Mom. No way.
“You know I’ll help
you,” Martín was saying. I looked up. His eyes are the same shiny,
bird’s-eye black as Mom’s. “I promise, Jacky.”
Martín’d had money at one point. All that time, while I was at Stevie’s place, going on spirit quests and hooking up with the mountain crazies, my trusty brother had been substitute teaching and waiting tables on the side. He lived with friends while our parents drank and clawed at each other. And I knew exactly where all his money had gone: an extra day on life support and the cheapest cremation in town.
I propped my elbows on the table
and hid my face in my hands. For one second I thought, I can do this. I can be an evil person. And then my nose began to sting,
and tears squirmed out of the corners of my eyes.
I put my hands down. “I’m never going to get out of here,” I said, louder than I meant to. All the little kids at the next table turned and stared.
Martín reached over and put
both his hands on my shoulders.
“I’m proud of you,” he said.
We made it to Bank of America at
4:56. The security guard almost didn’t let us in. “It’s an
emergency,” Martín said gently. I’m lucky he can be calm and hold it
together when things get crazy.
The teller, a small brown woman,
another lone descendant of a great and fallen tribe, counted out the bills. I
could tell I was freaking her out. I was letting myself really cry now.
Martín stood next to me
with his arm around me, rubbing my shoulder.
When the woman finished counting,
she said, very quietly, “Todo bien, hija?” The stacks of money were still
on her side of the counter.
She seemed like an okay person,
but for some reason her use of Spanish, like it was some code language of a
secret brotherhood, got under my skin. I said, “No, todo is not fucking
bien.”
“Jacky, please,”
Martín said, and then in Spanish, “We’ve had a problem in the family.”
“I’m so sorry,” the teller said in cold English,
placing the bills in one of those nylon bank envelopes. “There you go.
Good luck.”
At the woman’s house, the light
above the front door was on. I took a good look at the place. It was small,
beige, and stucco, with a chain-link fence and a dead lawn, and one of those
awful brown welcome mats that look like they’re made out of rotting hay. A sad
string of red and green bulbs ran over the eaves. Maybe with my thousand bucks
they’d bother to water the lawn and paint the house a color that didn’t belong
on the walls of a hospital.
The woman opened the door before
we even knocked. ”No need to come inside,” she said, blocking the doorway.
“Wonderful,”
Martín said, gripping my arm.
“It’s all still at the
storage place. I suppose you know where that is. Off the 99 on Hazelnut? It’s a
left turn at the exit if you’re headed south. I already called to tell them
you’re coming.”
“You just left it all
there?” I said.
“What else do you do with
junk?” she said. She pressed a paper into Martín’s hand. “That’s the
code you’ll need to get in.” She looked at the nylon envelope I was
clutching. “I guess that’s for me,” she said. But as her hand came forward,
I snatched the envelope away.
“No,” I said. Martín
squeezed my arm and I shook him off. “You know,” I began, but I was
having trouble meeting her eyes, getting the words out. “Don’t you think
you should apologize?”
The woman’s eyes narrowed.
“What exactly should I be apologizing for?”
“For calling our stuff
junk,” I said. “For holding our dead mother for ransom.”
The woman rolled her eyes like I
was some idiot from Greenpeace trying to tell her about whales. “Let’s
just finish up this business so we can both get back to our lives,” she said.
I waved the envelope at her.
“This is my life,” I said.
“This is my whole life. You could have just given her back. You can still
do that. Don’t you see?” And there they were again, my silly tears.
“Don’t you see that’s the right thing to do? Don’t you see that’s what’s
decent?”
For a second, something in
her face started to move. But then it stopped just as quick.
Firmly, gently, Martín
took my wrist. He pried the envelope out of my hand and gave it to her.
“Thank you very much,” she
said. Then she smiled. “I knew you
would come back. I knew it as soon as you said that thing about the
dreamcatchers. Indians set a lot of store by their dead.”
She shut the door.
On our way down the 99, I cried
like crazy. I mean, like one of those “They took my baby!” Lifetime movie women. Martín drove
slowly and didn’t try to drown me out with the radio while I sobbed and banged
my head against the window.
“Jacky,” Martín said
after one particularly ear-grating howl. “Calm down, okay? It’s all good
now. We’re good. We’ve got her back.” Then he said, the words awkward in
his mouth, “Sana. Sana.”
I hadn’t expected Martín to come
out with that. It was this funny old spell our mother used to say when we got
hurt. It started with, “Sana, sana, culito de rana,” and she would
run her finger gently over the scrape or bruise, the palm caught in the
umbrella shaft. Even in high school, when I hated her and she hated me, she
would still say that spell over me if I cut my finger chopping onions or got
scratched in a fight at school. It wasn’t really the same coming from Martín,
but it calmed me.
The guy at the storage place took
our slip and pulled up the metal grate. The thing was packed and dark. I
wondered if the woman had really left everything as is, or if she had picked
over what was good before abandoning it to us.
“Bro, you got a flashlight or
something you could lend us?” Martín asked the guy, another white guy.
He rolled his eyes. “You know how
many times people ask me for things like that? Why don’t you people come
prepared for once?” I gaped at him, but Martin smiled and nodded and said,
“No problem, man. Don’t worry about it. We’ll use our phones.” The man
wheeled away in a huff.
“Let’s just get this over
with,” Martín said.
Our phone lights flashing, we started
rummaging through it, all the junk that Dad had stashed there when he moved
into the one-bedroom, after we took Mom off life support. There were all sorts
of things in there: my finger paintings from kindergarten. Martín’s first bike.
One box was full of old Nescafe cans. Inside them, packed in newspaper, were
wooden toys from Nicaragua, little locomotives and tractors and cars.
I started in on another box. At
the top was an envelope with a few photos. It was Mom when she was young. I’d
never seen her like that: truly pretty, before alcohol stretched out her face
and put marks around her eyes.
“Bingo,” Martín said, from somewhere at the back of the unit. I shone my phone at him. He was holding what looked like a canister of fancy tea.
“Great, let’s get this stuff
out of here,” I said.
“Wait,” Martín said. He held it
out to me. “Take…uh, take it for a second, will you? I wanna see what else is
in here.”
Unwillingly, I stuffed my phone
in my back pocket and took the urn from him. It was so heavy I almost let it
drop. There were words engraved on the metal: “Loving Wife and Mother.”
“Fuck!”
I said.
“What is it?” Martín said,
looking up from the box he was digging in.
I looked at him. “After all
those stupid fights, she finally got what she wanted.”
“What do you mean?”
“She begged me not to move out,
remember? All she wanted was for me to stay. Like if I just stuck with it a
little while longer, we were all going to change.”
“You think you could have done something?” Martín said. “You know better than that, Jacky.”
“I dunno,” I said. “I mean, I
know there was no getting between her and Dad. And if you tried to stop her
from drinking, she’d just get madder…”
“Stop it,” Martín said. His
voice was really gentle. “Just stop.”
But I couldn’t help myself. I
kept thinking—if I had just been there, I could have hidden her car keys. Kept
her in the house for an hour or two, until she calmed down, sobered up.
It wasn’t true, but I wanted to
believe it anyway. That small things like that made all the difference.
KP Vogell is an artist and writer from California’s Central Valley.
I don’t remember the moment I first realized other men also carried stampedes of forked ghosts sewn into layers of their skin. Or took Picasso’s Guernica in the form of injections. Bloodstreams becoming slaughterhouse runoff. The signs are everywhere I look. A tattoo of an artillery shell on a male ER nurse’s inner forearm. A salty puddle of whispering blood left on the pavement. Moonlight shot out on a block darker than the inside of a white whale’s mouth. My mother would see tennis shoes hanging from a wire and say it meant war like a storm blooming hollow in the gray mind of the wind.
///
I once watched a man, through a black security door, doing lines of coke on a table: inside of the same kitchen I used to eat at as a child: inside the same house with the front yard where my father used to pitch Wiffle balls for me to hit. The table wasn’t black, but if it had been, I wonder if it would’ve made me think of a zebra’s back.
///
Two brown boys were recently shot dead while sitting in a van in the parking lot of a nearby elementary school. There were a half a dozen flashes from a weapon firing on them and it was all caught on footage by a neighbor’s surveillance camera. Now people leave white candles near the spot where the boys’ muted light fell and cracked our hearts into flocks of migratory birds. Some say even their guardian angels were donning bulletproof vests.
///
I can still see horses pasturing in the hills: one white one and three brown ones that appear black under the swollen rose gray clouds. I wonder if they can feel the cold imprint of the neighborhood on their coats. In my head I can hear their hoof beats which sound more like giant men taking axes to bone. I imagine their past lives being transformed by raw heat. Their brains turning into black glass. Their heads becoming burning voids of matter and woodsmoke. Their vitrified fragments like abstract shadows hardened from the bitter ashes of consciousness. Each becoming another exit wound to shape in our names. Or another weapon for us to hold against the bulbed throat of the sun.
Anuel Rodriguez is a Mexican-American poet living in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, DREGINALD, decomP, The Acentos Review, and elsewhere.
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