Latinx

How I Learned to Be Black in America

Posted on by

By Icess Fernandez Rojas

I was at the end of my fourth-grade year when I learned I was black and what that meant.

And it wasn’t that I didn’t know I was black. That was obvious — dark skin that popped against my white classmates’ skin during dodge ball, kinky hair chemically beat into submission, the questioning stares from teachers during roll call after their weak attempts to say my name correctly.

I knew I was Black. But I didn’t know what that meant. Not really.

My Black comes from Cuba, as sweet as the sugar cane my ancestors harvested. My Black touched the shores of West Africa before touching the sands of the Caribbean. And Papá didn’t say much more about being black other than we were, I am, black and with it, there are things he couldn’t quite explain.

The route home on the hot, sticky bus ride was the same every day of every year so I knew it better than anyone. On that day, when the school bus rounded the corner, passing the white house with the blue trim, I knew the next stop would be mine. By that time, there would only be a handful of us kids still left on the bus. A couple of girls, like a set of bookends, would sit in the front. They looked a grade or two younger than me, their blinding Lisa Frank bookbags still on their backs. A couple of third-grade girls, blonde and well dressed, were sprinkled in the middle, sitting with their backs against the side of the bus wilting against the crosswind. And then toward the back was me, hair like a cotton ball against the Houston humidity. That afternoon was hot and sticky, summer a couple of degrees away. The air from open windows didn’t make the school bus any less of a hot box and green vinyl seats glued themselves to the back of our thighs as our sweat-soaked t-shirts clung to our backs.

The bus stopped right in front of my house. But that didn’t matter. Sitting behind me, loud as day, was the reason I wanted to leap from the moving bus most days.

The group of white boys had spent the bus ride calling me everything but a child of God. My hair, my skin, my clothes, my voice were all up for ridicule. Usually, I ignored it, pretended I couldn’t hear them, and then read my book or disappeared into my inner thoughts. He-Man and She-Ra would be on by the time I ran into my house so I concentrated on that. Mamá y Papá would be there. My baby sister would be too, home early from kindergarten. The house would smell like ropa vieja or picadillo con papa or arroz con frijoles negros and I would be home, speaking my Spanish and being who I was.

“Hey, you. What kind of black are you?” one of them asked. His face was red from the heat. He was from my grade but in another classroom. I recognized him from the hallways and during recess. He was one who liked making fun of the girls. He especially liked the girls who cried in front of him.

Another white boy, who was in my class, had answered when he saw I was ignoring him. “She speaks that Mexican.” His voice like a dart, designed to hurt.

I kept ignoring them as they snickered, mocking me in their fake Spanish. The boy in my grade looked over the seat to make commentaries about my reactions. “She’s about to cry. Are you gonna cry in Mexican?” I made my face cement, his laugh burning on the inside of my ear. I wanted to become She-Ra, Princess of Power, and kick them. Hard. I wanted them to stop making fun of me, but I knew anything I’d say they would be used as timber for their fire.

“But she’s one of those Negros. Look at her hair. She is darker than those Mexicans. I don’t believe you speak Mexican, girl. Talk. Say something.”

As the bus inched closer to my stop, I popped up and sat closer to the bus driver, using the inertia from the moving bus to propel me forward. The cackle from the back of the bus rattled me.

I didn’t understand then what was happening, why these boys were being mean to me in this way. Why they called me Mexico and Negro. Why was my hair and my color a source of teasing? This wasn’t the first time it happened and it wasn’t the last. When I’d tell an adult, something our teachers and other adults told us to do when we felt threatened, I was always told to ignore them or to suck it up. Or boys will be boys. Or maybe I shouldn’t speak Spanish. Or if I straighten my hair. Or if I wear clothes like the other girls. If I looked and acted more like other girls who look like me, you know, black, I would blend in more because at least the black kids would play with me.

When the bus finally stopped in front of my house, I ran to my front door, past my parents, and through to the backdoor. My tears were coals. My parents yelled for me to come back, asking what was wrong. I didn’t want to answer them. I didn’t want anything but one thing. I climbed to the top of my swing set, the platform right before you slide down, and I dropped to my knees.

I prayed that day, in between heavy sobs and screams. I prayed for God to make me white because no one makes fun of white people. No one was taunting them because they were black and spoke Spanish. Those boys weren’t the only ones who made me feel like this. Other students, teachers, and other adults were experts at the microaggression. Outside of school,

anyone, even any regular person in the supermarket made sport of making black people feel uncomfortable in their own skin. I saw it. I felt it. But it was worse when they heard me speak or saw my mother’s caramel Guatemalan skin. They’d ask her who’s child was she taking care of. The look on their faces when they realized I was her child let me know that I’d be explaining my blackness and my Latinaness for the rest of my life.

Why did God make me Black? Why didn’t he make me white? Or at least the same Black as the other Black girls in my grade. It was years before I received my answer.

***

Thirty years later, a Langston Hughes poem taught me the answers to the questions I asked when I was 8 years old.

Hughes wrote “I Look at the World” in Nov. 1930, scribbled in pencil on the back of a book – An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry. He had a poem, “Silhouette,” in this collection already, however, he wrote three poems inside this book. They were discovered and printed in Poetry magazine in 2009.

“I Look at the World” is deceivingly simple when I first read it as a 38-year-old woman in 2016. I was overwhelmed by its simplicity and by the news dominating the headlines at the time. The death of black brothers and sisters flooded my timeline for years – Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile. #Oscarssowhite was gaining momentum. Then-President Barack Obama, a black president in his second term, declared a federal emergency in Flint, MI after the water became contaminated and stayed that way. And after six months and a move back to Houston, I was recovering from a suicide attempt in the safety of the same home I ran to that day, surrounded by memories and ghosts of the old neighborhood – the bus rides, the questions, the labels of not really being black enough or Latina enough. I was combating shame, guilt, rage, extreme sadness, and darkness. Sometimes one right after another.

Hughes gave me permission to feel that anger but only if I could use it like She-Ra, a superpower that transformed me.

From beyond the grave, Hughes told me about myself:

“I look at the world
From awakening eyes in a black face And this is what I see:
This fenced-off narrow space Assigned to me.”

When I read Hughes use the word Black, I stopped reading and blinked until I was sure I was reading correctly. He didn’t say African American or Negro, an American term which he used in poems such as “Let America Be America Again.” He wrote Black. For the first time in a long time, I was included in a conversation about existence in my own country that had eluded me. However, the experience of being Black in the world hadn’t. In Brazil, Nayara Justino lost her Globeleza Carnival Queen crown for being too dark. In Mexico, 1.38 million of its citizens were counted as being of African descent. Slowly, very slowly, the world around me — long time acquaintances, coworkers, former classmates I ran into at the Wal-Mart– was beginning to consider that Black not only came in different shades but in different cultures and languages.

But while that stanza in Hughes’ poem reflected my Blackness back to me, it also referenced a prison I knew too well, the “fenced-off narrow space.” To the world, I was just another Black girl that needed to stay in her lane or be put there if I dared to put a toe out of it.

Or…on a good day…my walls were prescribed. To perform someone else’s idea of being Black. No speaking Spanish, no references to anything from home, no salsa music, no merengue dancing. Practice your slang, your African American words, so that it sounds natural. Learn when to laugh, how to laugh, at things that don’t make sense right away. Don’t ask what things are. Accept. Accept. Accept.

When another Black person called me sister, I didn’t understand what they meant by that. For me un hermana is a relation. The first time someone referenced Teddy Pendergrass or Franky Beverly to me, I nodded as if I knew who they were but I knew if I said Beny More they would know not who that was so I kept my mouth shut. I don’t know how to play Spades, the game on the island was dominos.

At every turn, my Blackness was an undefinable strange thing. I was an odd person. An other and it started early, way before my bus ride home.

Because being Black in America was one thing, but being Afro-Latina in Black America while living in America was something else.

***

Papá and I used to talk about everything. He told me about life in Cuba before the revolution and in Spain after he exiled in the early 1960s. What he told me about the world was that being black was different everywhere he went.

In Cuba, being Black was being someone’s servant. In Spain, it was like being the most exotic fruit.

In America, being Black was being invisible and discounted.

But being Black, Latina, and a woman in America was the worst.

“You will struggle,” he said. “You’re smart, too. They are not going to like that. They will not respect that.”

“Who,” I asked, my 8-year-old brain tried to process this advice.

He had brought me in from the outside. He had let me cry. He had let me be angry. He had calmed Mamá, the warrior, down. And then Papá talked about Blackness.

“Everyone. Blacks and whites here.” His face was a straight line. “They will want you to stay in your place.”

That’s when the anger began to boil.

***

That anger returned, steaming hot, when Sandra Bland’s death was ruled a suicide in July 2016.

Hughes wrote about the “walls oppression builds” and by the time Sandra was buried, those walls scraped the sky’s underbelly.

My Black grew deeper. My Afro-Latina grew deeper. For the first time, I saw them as one in the same. Because Sandra Bland lived her best Black life and it mattered every single day. My Black life does too. And when that life is on the opposite side of oppression, there’s no difference between Sandra and me.

“I look at my own body
With eyes no longer blind –

And I see that my own hands can make The world that’s in my mind.
Then let us hurry, comrades, The road to find.”

Hughes gives me permission to be Black, all the way Black. I don’t have to perform someone else’s idea of Blackness with him.

“Are you mixed with something?”

“I can tell you’re not black because of your nose.”

“I saw your Mama. Why is she white and you’re not?” “How did you learn to speak Spanish?”

These questions have followed me around since kindergarten, since the white boys on the bus. These questions became more aggressive in middle school, said with sandpaper and gasoline. By the time of high school, they were Molotov cocktails and landmines.

Now, they are grenades.

***

That day in fourth grade, on top of my swing set, under the Houston sun, I baked. I turned an entire shade darker. I couldn’t be white even if I prayed for it.

Through the years, even right up to his death, Papá, when my Blackness was questioned or ridiculed or if I ever wished to be something else, he’d set me right.

“Tu,” he said, “eres una negra bonita.” I was a beautiful black girl.

“You have to say that,” I said in Spanish. “You’re my dad.”

“You’re my daughter, of course you’re beautiful. I’m not an ugly black man!”

We laughed. Papá patted his cheek, proud of himself and his looks. A grin softened the blow from earlier. He continued.

“People will be jealous because you are beautiful, and smart, and talented. This life,” he said, “will be difficult for you”

“Por que, Papá?”

“It is always difficult for those who are different and proud of it.”

My dad died in 2003 and I’ve learned more about my Blackness since then. My blackness means anger but it means joy too. My Blackness is magical because my ancestors were hella magical. My Blackness eats pork roasted with garlic gloves, mojo, and Adobo. But my Black also doesn’t mind a rib or two. My Black is part of a tapestry, interwoven in centuries of overcoming and achieving. My Black dances a guaguanco and rumba and salsa so good you would swear the ancestors had taken over. My Black speaks in many tongues.

Being Black in America is all this, plus more and every day I’m learning what that means. So I’m doing what Hughes advised, racing toward “the road to find.”

Icess Fernandez Rojas is a writer and educator who lives in Houston. She is a graduate of Goddard College’s MFA program. Her work has been published in Rabble Lit, Minerva Rising Literary Journal, NBCNews.com, HuffPost and the Guardian and the Feminine Collective‘s anthology Notes from Humanity. She is a recipient of the Owl of Minerva Award, a VONA/Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation alum, and a Kimbilio Fellow. Follow her on Twitter: @Icess and at her website: http://icessfernandez.com.

Medusa

Posted on by

By Steve Castro

            after Hideo Hagiwara (1913-2007)

Looking with your head up, your seductive eyes
made it incapable for your victims to look away.

You held a snake’s head with thumb & ring finger,
as if to pluck, as if to feed.

No pierced earlobe despite countless fangs.
Nipples exposed.

Around your luscious neck, jewels
as bright as those that adorned Lucifer.

There was a sharpness to your silence,
like the sword used to slay you.

Steve Castro‘s debut poetry collection, Blue Whale Phenomena, was published by Otis Books, 2019 (Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, California). Publications include Plume; DIAGRAM; Green Mountains Review; Forklift, Ohio; Water~Stone Review; So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library; The Florida Review. Three poems (including two prose poems) are forthcoming in Guesthouse, and two prose poems co-written with Daniel Romo are forthcoming in Hotel Amerika. Birthplace: Costa Rica.

the sailor girl

Posted on by

By Monique Quintana

If her grandmother had not been dead, she might not have cared about theatrics. She first fell in love with the theater at her grandmother’s funeral. Her grandmother didn’t want an open casket. She had always found such a thing to be tacky, and so to make up for it, her husband ordered the most ornate flower arrangements he could find in the shop catalog. He really wanted one in the shape of a horseshoe, resembling a beauty that he had seen with his wife once. They had gone to look at the horse races or the pony races, so he called them because he was a cowboy man who liked to sound endearing. He had been able to see the beauty up close because he and his bride had been invited to the winner’s circle by a man that was even richer than he was. There was always going to be someone wealthier than her grandparents, Rae would often think to herself, and that gave her the contentment that she could never fully explain.

But at her grandmother’s funeral, her whole family wore a big hat as a mask of money. Throughout the ceremony, she could feel her cousin tugging on the ribbons of her dress, not because he was a pervert, but out of sheer boredom. None of the grandchildren had much use for the ceremony. Now ritual was quite a different story. Instead of their grandfather’s much longed-for ring of flowers, a girl showed up with a flower o’ gram. She was brown like them, thank god, thought Rae and she had her pantyhose line tattooed all the way up her legs. The sprinklers went on and made her stilettos slop and bob in the grass, and she stood with her arms stretched on, perhaps hoping not to fall. She’s like an angel, Rae said out loud. The girl sang a sailor tune that Rae almost thought she recognized, but then she remembered that everyone in her family hated sailors, and she knew right then that this angel girl was a mistake. All the funeral guests swayed in their weep, and Rae’s mother cried even louder, all because of the sailor girl. Rae adored how the sailor girl’s dressed glowed in the morning light like a daffodil. She had seen daffodils only once, at a fruit stand near Pacheco Pass. Rae began to wonder why her grandmother chose to die when it was such beautiful weather out, but then she remembered that the woman had been known all over town for her hospitality, and she wouldn’t want her guests to get rained on. Dying in the sunlight had been her grandmother’s most beautiful courtesy of all.

To pay her own respects and courtesy, the sailor girl walked up to the casket, her voice slowing down to a low ring like a schoolhouse triangle and pulled a bunch of daffodils out of the heave of her breasts. Daffodils! Thought Rae. She had wished the things into reality. The stems shook when they were laid out on the casket, and the sailor girl sloshed off to the periphery of their little green tent and sat on top of the headstone of the town’s only white man. Someone had kindly brought a pail of dirt, and a bunch of white roses rolled up in her grandmother’s butcher paper. She had used the stuff to cover the kiddie tables when they had barbeques. The butcher paper flew away in the breeze, and Rae or any of her cousins, for that matter, didn’t try to catch it. Rae liked the way the breeze felt on her legs. She watched the sailor girl pull a cigarette out of the sack slung on her back, and she watched her light it. The girl had skinny fingers that shook, and she had raccoon eyes from either a lack of sleep or too much black makeup. Rae couldn’t tell at all.

All the family took turns walking up to the casket and putting a rose on it. The adults went first, and the younger ones, the children trailed behind them. Rae’s cousins tried to look like they were putting their roses on the casket lovingly, twisting their wrists in circles and making their mouths in Os that only Rae took notice of. She surprised herself when she jolted away and out from the line, still thumbing the rose stem against her dress.

Hey girl, the sailor girl called out to her. Rae felt her stomach turn and sour, and she thought it was rude how the girl called her that way, but she walked over to see what she wanted. Who died? The sailor girl asked her. Rae could tell by the rasp in her voice that this sailor girl wasn’t really a girl, but a woman. When Rae told her it was her grandmother that had died, she smiled. The skin under her eyes was loose, and she had a tiny map of veins on her thighs. She flicked her cigarette in the green sea, kicking her feet on the stone. She floated in the green. My grandma would have killed us if we got a flower o’ gram at her funeral. Rae could feel the words shape in her throat, but we didn’t get you, it was a mistake, but the shudder of cousins made their way over to the stone. There was the buzz of their voices, questions, a new cigarette passed over their mouths, their mouths like little bird beaks. You all are clowns, the sailor girl said.

All the cousin kids were much more beautiful than the ones who came before them, their mothers and fathers tapping their boots against the ground, no lassos today, just trying to send their dead off in style. They bought all their kid clowns Shirley temple sodas at the bar at the reception hall, and when no one was looking, Rae and all her cousin clowns spiked them with tequila, and though it wasn’t the right concoction, it went down smooth and justly.

Monique Quintana is the author of Cenote City (Clash Books, 2019) and a contributor at Luna Luna Magazine. She has been awarded artist residencies to Yaddo, The Mineral School, and Sundress Academy of the Arts. She was also the inaugural winner of Amplify’s Writer of Color Fellowship and has been awarded fellowships to the Community of Writers and the Open Mouth Poetry Retreat. She lives in Fresno’s Tower District and can be found at moniquequintana.com.

No One Has Ever Told Me To Go Back to My Planet, But If They Did, I’d Roll Up My Hoopty’s Window and Listen to M.E.T.H.O.D Man

Posted on by

By Alan Chazaro

simply to feel the air and bounce of my 5th grade self, when we’d gather
around Aldo’s boombox like acolytes ready to worship inside a temple

in the slums of Shaolin. For the diss tracks and interludes
looping uninterrupted in our empty apartment while Pa was off at work. It works:

listening to the hype I grew up on as Californian Pochito.
When we studied the Wu’s interdimensional arts, learned

how to teleport across coasts, into the shadows of the 36 chambers
within myself. Back then, all my neighbors were Vietnamese, and the smell of fish

and oil and somewhere faraway brought me back home. Yes, this is home. And
wherever I go I drag this unsheltered memory with me, as my shelter. True,

I’ve stepped out to hold different suns in my mouth while reciting lyrics in foreign tongues.
I’ve tripped on new shit, not always old shit, but always good shit. Believe

me when I say I’m ready to conjure the elixirs of hip hop mixed with single-parent
love mixed with a cassette tape stuck on rewind, wherever my spaceship drifts.

Believe me when I tell you I am searching for better worlds. Believe
we will one day get there.

Alan Chazaro is the author of This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) and the forthcoming Piñata Theory (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). He is a graduate of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley and a Lawrence Ferlinghetti Fellow at the University of San Francisco’s MFA program. He is currently a creative writing adjunct professor in the Bay Area, and the co-founding editor at HeadFake.

My Girl

Posted on by

By Marco Villatoro

They had placed the girl on a cement bench just outside the hospital. Francisco and I arrived with a pine coffin, one he had hammered together that morning. In the past few weeks, he had been busy making coffins. Cholera had swept through the jungle towns of Guatemala, killing people by the hundreds. The hospital didn’t cure anybody. It was more a waiting room for the dying. They had run out of supplies. Families of the sick had to purchase their own bags of insulin at the town pharmacy and bring them to the hospital, which the nurses used to keep the victims hydrated.

The inside of the ramshackle clinic smelled of vomit and shit. The sick were laid out, one next to another, on beds, foldable cots, rugs on the hallway floors. The nurses couldn’t keep up with the cleaning. Once someone died, the orderlies carried the body outside to the waiting families, while more victims of the disease stumbled through the front door.

The dead girl on the bench had no family waiting for her. Francisco and I, church workers, stood in their stead. Two orderlies had carried her out on a stained stretcher. She was half-wrapped in a bed sheet. One orderly apologized for leaving her on the bench but said there was no room inside to keep the cadavers.

The slab she lay on, the unpolished, concrete, backless bench, was cool to the touch. She was still warm. She was dressed in the indigenous clothing of her people: a dark red blouse with tiny embroidered flowers around the neckline, and a wrap-around skirt woven out of the green, blue, and white threads of the Q’eqchi’, one of the two dozen distinct Mayan tribes spread throughout Guatemala. Her clothes were not stained. I figured the cholera had emptied her out in her home, and someone had dressed her before bringing her to the hospital. The fever had finally done her in. The shell it left behind was still beautiful. She was eleven, maybe twelve years old. Mother’s milk in her first years had stitched in her some length of bone, but poverty had stretched her skin over her cheeks like a tight brown tarp over scaffolding. But she was lovely. She would have bloomed into someone a village talks about.

My wife Michelle and I had lived in Guatemala for about three years when the cholera broke out. We were missioners of the Catholic Church. We had worked with both Mayan and mestizo (“mixed”) people who were as concerned about land rights and cooperatives as they were baptisms and holy days. All of our organizing work shifted once the illness came to our small jungle town of Poptún.

Francisco and I placed the coffin beside the bench. An orderly ran out of the hospital. He apologized as he worked the stained bed sheet out from under her body. “We’ve only got so many,” he said, as he pulled the sheet’s edge out from under her hip. He hurried back in.

Francisco had built the coffin. I put her in it. It wasn’t my first dead body, though the others had all been babies, most who died before their first birthday from worms, amoebic dysentery, or some strange fever that had its roots in poverty. Not that I was inured to handling dead babies; but it had become one of my religious tasks, a service to the families of the dead.

This girl was the oldest corpse I had ever touched. I dug my left arm under her shoulder blades and slipped my right hand under her thighs. She was warm and felt alive for it, but her one loose arm fell and dropped to her side. Death makes us heavy. I had to hoist her from the bench and jostle her slightly to balance her weight in my arms. Her head slipped off my shoulder and fell, pulling tight the dark brown skin of her neck. I adjusted her again to take her out of that awful position. Her head plopped back into the curve of my shoulder and neck, like a child who’s asleep. Her face was right next to mine, her lips close to my ear. The movement unkinked her throat. Her mouth was open. Trapped air in her lungs slipped one last time over her larynx. She whispered Aaaahhhh to me.

The mother arrived with two clear plastic sacks of insulin that she had bought at the pharmacy. She was young, maybe mid-twenties, and dressed just like her daughter. She didn’t speak Spanish. She stared at her child in my arms and yelled in Q’eqchi’ then rushed to my side and spoke indigenous words that I will never know. Her body rattled. She dropped the insulin bags. I apologized over and again in Spanish. She didn’t understand. I crouched and lay the girl in the coffin, straightened her head, which kept rolling to one side, crossed her arms over her chest, pressed her legs together and tucked her dress under her calves, like a clumsy mortician. Her mother knelt next to the coffin and caressed the girl’s face. Francisco gave her a moment then gently spoke to her in Q’eqchi’ while pulling her away. When we placed the lid and Francisco started hammering, the young woman raised her head and cried out as though hating the heavens.

Michelle was working in another part of town. I sent word to her that we needed our Jeep to take the child and mother back to their village. She arrived ten minutes later, parked close to the coffin and opened the back hatch. She comforted the mother, put her arm around her and let the woman weep and yell, a mix of mourning and rage. Francisco and I loaded the coffin into the Jeep, but it didn’t fit. We had to leave the hatch open. That was a worry. The pock-marked, stony roads could chuck the casket out of the Jeep.

Francisco left to check on the sick inside the hospital, I suppose to take a preliminary body count. I opened the passenger door for the mother. She hesitated, looked at me as though deciding whether or not to trust me, then looked at the vehicle and its interior, all of it strange to her. But she was too broken to argue, and climbed in. In between sobs she said the name of her village, a hamlet near a village called Machaquilá. Michelle drove us out of town.

Nearly a third of the coffin stuck out through the open hatch. The roads made it impossible for Michelle to drive smoothly. I had to press my forearms against the head of the box to keep it from falling out. Dust bellowed in and left a thin sheet on the coffin’s lid. All those preparative acts of faith—the crossing of the arms over her chest, straightening her head—had been a waste of time. She rolled inside. Her forehead bashed against the pinewood walls.

The hamlet was far beyond Machaquilá. I don’t remember its name. We crawled over the jungle road for nearly an hour before reaching it. Night came on. We crested a hill. The coffin slipped a few inches. I hugged it. The headlights slashed across the hamlet’s thatched roofs and adobe walls. A tiny, humble village of a humble people. That’s what we liked to say about the Mayans, we from outside their world, religious foreigners of a five-hundred-year old history of religious foreigners to whom the Mayans lowered their heads in humility.

Not now. Not this village. They stepped out of the flickering shadows of their adobe homes, away from the few candles that burned inside the huts, and into the violent slash of the headlights. Women and girls were dressed in the same clothes as the dead child. The men wore western clothing—old, button-down shirts, jeans, some with baseball hats on. One wore a faded Michael Jackson t-shirt. They didn’t cower or look confused by the Jeep, having seen vehicles before in town and on the roads. Most of the women, isolated in the village most all their days, stared at us. Some backed away. But they all knew why we were here.

A woman saw the coffin sticking out of the back and yelled something in Q’eqchi’. One young man walked out from behind a hut, his lithe arms to his sides like a man with invisible holsters on his hips. I wondered why he hadn’t been at the hospital. He had his work machete still tied to his belt-rope. He had probably worked all day in a rich man’s fields, clearing the land for cattle.

Michelle parked. The mourning filled the air. I had never heard an entire village cry, not in this country, where children dropped dead every day. The father stared at me. I had never seen an angry Mayan man.

His wife, sitting in the passenger seat, cried out his name, “¡Cux! ¡Ay, Cux!” She was trapped inside a metal box, that’s what the Jeep was to her, a thing she had rarely seen before, much less ridden in. The car door made no sense. She hurled herself against the vault of steel and vinyl. She beat her palms against the glass and screamed. Michelle reached over and grabbed the handle. The mother tumbled out and crawled. The headlights caught her: the earth puffed with the rub of her knees and palms. Her husband Cux picked her up, held her, while others gathered around them. An old man and a teenage boy hauled the box out from under me. They didn’t look at me, as though I wasn’t there. No hello. No customary, Mayan-humble greeting. They pulled her out and didn’t close the hatch and carried her into the black jungle where the headlights couldn’t reach. The entire hamlet followed, each of them disappearing into the night, leaving us alone before their empty adobe homes. Michelle turned and looked at me. We sat there for a long moment. She reached over and shut the passenger door. I slammed the hatch closed and twisted the lock, as though all of Guatemala outside the Jeep were too much. I needed this vehicle and its hermetic seal of my own country.

*****

That day still grips me, a first-world Salvadoran-American who, for a few years, had dwelt among the poor. Michelle and I had seen, during our time in Central America, what the statisticians refer to as a high infant mortality rate. But the stats show only numbers. They cannot reveal what that rate does to a people, how it forms within them certain beliefs, superstitions, and tricks of psychological survival. Many parents we worked with did not name their babies until the child’s first birthday. To do so meant becoming too attached. Twelve months of survival put meat on a baby’s bones, especially if the child had been breast fed. A first birthday meant a name and a sigh of relief. Not naming the baby was a psychological ruse, Don’t get too close. It never worked.

The Mayan girl wasn’t the first person I’d put in a coffin. Michelle and I had participated in babies’ funerals before. I remember one nameless child, perhaps nine months old, who I put into a rush-job of a box, its corners uneven, with a few bent nails on the edges. The small family stood around me. The mother, between sobs, cursed herself for rousing the wrath of God. She confessed to having thought about what name to give the child in recent weeks. She couldn’t help herself. She had considered names, ones that she had never uttered, just thought. But God, she cried out, had heard her thoughts and was punishing her for them. Her silent, motherly considerations had been a form of pride, or independence, things that God won’t put up with. Having the babe die was the Lord’s way of putting things straight. She said all this while I placed the baby in the box, atop a folded blanket. Right then, a half-inch, gray, curling worm crawled out of the baby’s nostril. The mother screamed. I picked the worm off his cheek, tossed it next to my boot and crushed it.

They too were Mayan but had lived in Poptún for years and were cut off from whatever village they had left behind, like many who hoped to find a better life in a town that, compared to the hamlets, was a city of opportunities. Isolated Mayans. That is a cultural, indigenous oxymoron. That day, no community walked to the cemetery, only the mother and father, two surviving children, Michelle and me. We buried the nameless child. They asked me to say a prayer. I, atheist, asked God to bless the innocent soul of. . .and I had to stop. No name. The mother, who now had anger in her wet, swollen eyes, dared to evoke God’s wrath once again, “I meant to name him Javier, after his grandfather.” I. Her taking the sole ownership of naming the child surprised me. It felt like a threat: anyone who dared to shush her for saying the name, or who came down from heaven to give her a smack across the face, would have to deal with her newborn wrath.

The twelve-year-old Mayan girl outside the hospital had a name, though we never learned what it was. She’d had a name for eleven years. To be so old meant that she was maciza, strong, durable, one of those people whose physiology could overcome most illnesses. But this was cholera, a bacterium that lives naturally in coastal waters, and infects fish and seafood, which people eat. It is highly contagious and can sweep through a town within a few days. Poor sanitation, contaminated water, inadequate hygiene—all the things of poverty—spread it. It is a violent way to die: projectile vomiting, uncontrollable diarrhea, spiked fevers, delusions. A victim loses a liter of fluids an hour. The veins desiccate. Blood thickens. The body becomes an internal desert. Shriveled skin, sunken eyes, low blood pressure, irregular heartbeat. The muscles cramp to the point of ripping off the bones. Shock can bring on death within minutes.

It can kill anybody, even first-world folk, but we have a far better chance of survival. Both Michelle and I had our bouts of sickness in Central America, especially stomach illnesses that had us running to the latrine every few minutes. I’ve had worms crawl up my throat. But we could drive to Guatemala City, where we had access to better health care. We had eaten well all our lives, as had our ancestors. We were not poor. It’s not simply the cholera that kills. Poverty sets the scene, generations that have never had enough to eat, who work the hardest jobs without having enough nutrients. The life expectancy in Guatemala is between forty-five and fifty. Around twenty-five babies out of a thousand die (in the U.S., it hovers around six per thousand).

We studied these statistics in college classes. Those numbers fed into our fledgling, romantic notions regarding working among the poor and oppressed. But they didn’t prepare us, at all. We were both twenty-three and had been married a year when we first moved to Central America. Two young fools in love, ready to save the world.

We didn’t save anybody. We simply joined in, as much as outsiders can, the daily lives of a people who never asked us to live with them. Some were thankful for our presence and our participation in their struggles. Most, I suspect, were indifferent to two more gringos who were passing through. Others, such as the girl’s hamlet, couldn’t stand the sight of us. I don’t blame them. Sometimes I think we weren’t dwelling among the poor but stumbling through their lives. I stumbled into the job of handling the dead. I wanted to do it, a macabre notion to some. Not to me. The girl on the bench rises in me like a ritual. I have loved her for decades and can’t explain why. Perhaps because she wasn’t a statistic—No. It was because she sighed. Sometimes I still feel it on my left cheek, whenever someone living is so rude to kiss me there and wipe her breath from me.

Marcos Villatoro is the author of several novels, two collections of poetry and a memoir. His Romilia Chacón crime fiction series has been translated into Japanese, German, Portuguese and Russian. He has written and performed essays on PBS and NPR. His latest work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. After living several years in Central America, Marcos moved to Los Angeles, where he teaches literature at Mount. St. Mary’s University.

Lucky Ugly

Posted on by

By Isabella Piedad Escamilla

your breath is spun / salt in my hands / my mouth your elbows / faux leather on / my steering wheel / which makes it easy / to pretend I’ve stolen / your skin I press / my palms against the wheel at red / lights your eye / lashes are shards / of mildew shards / of frosted glass / on a shower / door the whites of your / eyes the calcium / buildup in / my dishwasher / your teeth are fleshy / pearls of limestone / ready to crumble under / the weight of another’s / tongue neck / the spring of a pinball / machine resting / in my garage you’re / sprung baby’s / breath you’re / sprung rust on a blue / tricycle this would be easier / if you were / closer radio / static clattering /against the window this / would be / easier if grief / was like prayer / in a school / chapel / girls kneeling on / patterned carpet dressed / in plaid skirts I was / one of those / girls I didn’t know / this small / isolation of / each strand / would be / the frame of a steamroller / crushing / granite into baby / food your hair / trembles into tangled / bits of moths barely / there I live / in old / wives’ tales I know /from all the / lies we’ve told your / jeans are / ugly lucky / like my dog / the first / time he broke my skin / on my wrist and I / just turned / away / why / did I not bite him / back neon / oozing quiet / onto the grass if I’m so / weak / why / did I not / bite back we / know / we know we / know / forgetting is a / knot of running tar / you are but / I still fall / into troughs / of sleep my brain / fossilizes like / thin fish dead / in amber from / swimming through / your cavities / from breaking / into your dark

Isabella Piedad Escamilla is a Latinx writer from Salinas, California. A Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets fellowship recipient, she currently lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, where she studies plant genetics and poetry at Purdue University.

How to Love Dad on Drugs

Posted on by

After Natalie Diaz

By Anthony Aguero

Much younger than I am now
sat an obsolete, black bag that
whispered my name like the fruit
you and I have sinned over time
and time again. I am drawn,
then devoured, and finally at a
pause – my hand in midflight.
This bag is not with insulin needles.
This bag is dad’s next source of income.
That bag almost had me tricked.

The smell of a swampy canal and
catfish is how I’ll remember my
dad’s hands – O, those eyes of yours,
both dipped into the darkest evening.
That widened gaze shrieking
avenge, or sorry, or love.
No, saying I have bloodied my life.
Perdoname mijo. Who are you?
He shovels canal mud from his nail.

He shovels a hole in the backyard,
still that scent, but his eyes more
green or jaundiced with intent now.
You could have missed him dig
those hands into that hat, or hole,
sorry my eyes were meant to be closed,
recovering a round Tupperware filled
with precious crystals mother warned
me about. How they capture lives and
their screams were never heard.

I could’ve sworn I just heard you scream.
Wasn’t that you? Oh, sorry. My imagination
and all those ghosts.
 
There is a perfectly drawn, nude woman
in dad’s garage, and I am sure
any straight man or patron of the naked
would love this art in their home.
There is also an air mattress I don’t sit-
on. The sound of aggressive pornography
plays on a CRT TV set. He is on drugs,
as am I. Scattered all around us, a throne
designed by Corus, but unleashed.
The drawn woman watching over us.

On the weekends custody has us with him,
he’d have us sit in his pickup truck at various
stops in multiple cities within Imperial County.
The clarity of putting pieces together
much later, and how much brother and I
easily found adventure.
I wonder what he loved more.
He makes one more stop.

There is a man in the backyard of grandma’s home
whose head falls into his lap like a downpour of
emotion happening and he cannot contain the
bobbing skull that contains such fury, such sorrow.
My dad is a dancer with swift feet and pools of 
sweat burrowed with the scent of swamp, catfish, 
and something medicinal leaking from the mirror
of a body borrowed. Dormir, padre, dormir.

I, twice, borrowed my dad for the drugs I needed.
This is my ceremonious moment of the new car
I had been begging and begging for since the 
beginning of high school. All of those good grades
and excellent attendance record: the drugs I need.
He treats me like the transaction I asked for.
Who ever said love cannot also be timely?

He grinds the salt off of his already salted teeth.
Checks his breath and wipes the sweat off of his
forehead with some handkerchief. He asks me how
I am doing. I say everything is going okay. Then –
pause. He speaks as if he has something to say,
then I realize my dad is high once again.
He tells me he loves me and I can’t help and wonder
how to love the man with a crystal hidden under
the same tongue saying I love you.

Anthony Aguero is a queer writer in Los Angeles, CA. His work has appeared or will appear in Rhino Poetry, The Acentos Review, Bangalore Review, 2River View, The Temz Review, and Cathexis Northwest Press. Follow him on social media @shesnotinsorry.

Cry Baby

Posted on by

By Kathleen Alcalá

Oh, that moan was cold. It swept in under the door, crept across the floor, up the walls, crouched in the window corners, ready to come down on her at a moment’s notice. She felt that chill, heard that baby blue hiccup that meant Baby was up.

What’s up? she asked, as she lifted Baby from the crib, a safe crib, a guaranteedto keeplittlesnookumsoutofthewoodswhenthewolvesareout crib.

Cindi longed to climb into the crib herself, babe in arms, and sleep forever. Instead, she changed Baby, who didn’t try to flip off the table for once, and plopped her into a high chair while she heated the bottle.

Who’s to know what the cat knows? He had brought her a mouse again. Did this mean an extra-cold winter? Need to fill the larder with fat mice? Or just get fat? She patted her own belly, still loose and jellified from the pregnancy, the extra thirty pounds she gained down to maybe fifteen or twenty. Maybe a little more. As long as she was nursing, the clinic told her, she would lose weight. It didn’t happen. Her hunger was not as raging as during the pregnancy, but it still turned noisily inside of her, like an internal combustion engine craving coal in order to burn, burn, burn.

She came to when Baby started her hic -uppy cry again, to find the water boiling around the bottle – now too hot.

Oh, baby oh … I love you so! So many songs to Baby, but they didn’t mean Baby, did they? They meant the one who would end up with baby when it was all over – when the music stopped, when all the lovers went home, when no one would save the last dance for you.

My Mama done told me – but no, her mama did not tell her, told her nothing, not how it happened, only not to let it happen, which Beto guaranteed he would not let happen – murmuring in her ear, his hand creeping down her pants – until it did. Then he was gone – from town, to the Army, to work, to the Good Girl it turns out he was cheating on with you. But still. Cindi had never been happier, if only for those few weeks. The wind hummed a little louder.

Oh Baby, let’s try the bottle again. Baby grabbed it like a bear cub and practically turned the bottle inside out she sucked so hard.

The birds twittered. The sun came up. There were playful gusts of wind, like the day straightening its sheets as it got up from bed. She changed Baby again and put her in the playpen. She was just starting to pull up, trying to stand, so she could not be left by herself for a minute. Cindi grabbed some clothes and threw herself in the shower. As soon as she had shampoo in her hair, Baby started screaming. Cindi jumped out and grabbed a towel. Baby had fallen backwards in the playpen, but stopped crying as soon as she was picked up. Cindi brought her in the bathroom and tried to hold the wriggling infant while rinsing her own head in the sink.

By 7:00, Cindi had Baby in the car seat and was on her way to Mama’s.

That cold moan got in the car with her. It threatened to drown out the people on the radio who covered the news from overnight – floods, money, disasters, rich people getting richer. More floods. Cindi remembered she had not paid her credit card yet, and she would pay more if she did not pay that day. It started to sprinkle and she turned on the windshield wipers, the left one always sticking just a little before returning.

Cindi’s mother was at the door to take Baby. All frowns for Cindi, all smiles for Baby. Told her she looked fat. That she’d never get a husband looking like that, and of course, already with a baby. Baby.

At work, Cindi parked, got out of the car and straightened her shirt. She would eat only an apple for lunch today, she promised herself. Mondays were hell. Everyone was frantic, hung over, bright-eyed, meaning to do better, be nicer, eat only an apple for lunch.

Cindi’s desk was already stacked with forms to enter. Bruce must have brought more after she left work on Friday. At least the software was fixed. She put on her glasses and set to work. Every five forms she allowed herself to stop, initial them, and put them in a separate stack.

At 11:50, Natalie stopped by Cindi’s desk, wondered if she wanted to go to lunch with her and some others for Gale’s birthday. Cindi liked Natalie, and sort of liked Gale. But she said no, conscious of her tight top, her promised apple.

“Oh, come on,” Natalie said. “Just once.”

Cindi winced. That was exactly what he had said, just once, and nothing would happen. Nobody ever got pregnant the first time. That burn in her belly set in, that engine that wanted to be stoked, and she said yes.

The Daily Special was a Rueben sandwich, and Cindi ordered it. She had to lean forward to keep the juices, the dressing, the sour kraut, from dripping down her front. She told the whining apple part of her brain to shut up.

When she got back to the office, there were more forms. Bruce must not take lunch, she thought. Although about fifteen people processed, he was the only one who checked the forms before dividing them up among the processors. Only once did Cindi find an omission he should have caught.

Cindi called her mother to check on Baby. Baby’s fine. Maybe Dad and I should take her more of the time. Why? Asked Cindi. Dad’s not getting any younger. So you want to watch the baby more on top of watching Dad? Her mother was silent.

At 4:30 Cindi grabbed her purse and was pulling her hair back into a ponytail when she ran into Bruce in the hall. I was just coming to see you, he said. Oh yes? We are going to alter the form again, just one line, make it easier for the adjusters. If she left right then, she would beat the worst traffic on the Valley Highway. Can we talk about this tomorrow? She asked. Oh, sure. He continued on towards her cubicle with his load of forms. She knew he would drop some off along the way, the Johnny Appleseed of insurance claims. Cindi suddenly loathed the office, her job, her co-workers and their simple lives. She loathed the greasy spots on her blouse and the computer glasses she had forgotten to take off and leave on her desk. But she would not go back and risk running into Bruce again.

The wind was blowing fitfully, stronger, when she got outside. She shielded her face in the crook of her arm from the dust devils picking their way across the parking lot. Bits of rock and dirt pelted her head and arms.

At her mother’s house, the wind tried to shut the car door on her leg. She limped to the door and struggled inside. Her Dad was asleep in the recliner in the living room, a game on television, the low roar of the crowd backwash through the dim room. She heard Baby call out, a rising note of a question.

Baby broke into a smile as Cindi picked her up out of the high chair. Those sharp little teeth in front, that dimple just like his. Baby broke Cindi’s heart every day. She had a little bruise on her forehead.

What’s this? asked Cindi, kissing it.

Oh, I’m so tired, said her mother, holding her back with both hands. Baby was into everything today.

She’s pulling up. She wants to stand.

I had to put her in the high chair to get anything done. Baby wore a bib full of soggy Cheerios.

For how long? Oh, I don’t know. She wouldn’t nap today.

She always naps. Baby bounced her lips off Cindi’s shoulder. She was hungry. She was also soaked.

We’ve got to go before the storm gets any worse. Cindi could hear the wind calling around the corner, whispering sour nothings in the ears of the house.

Leave her here. She’ll be okay.

What’s with you, mom? Thank you. I’ll see you later.

It’s just…

What?

I ran into my friend Sylvia at Safeway. She has a son.

Yeah… so?

I, I gave her your phone number. Maybe he’ll call.

I told you mom, the last thing I want to do right now is date. End of story.

Cindi picked three empty bottles out of the sink and crammed them into Baby’s diaper bag. I have zero time for pendejos.

Who else is going to date you? Cindi’s mother could be mean. She wished she could afford real daycare.

I’ll see you tomorrow. It’s Tuesday, remember, so I have to be there a half hour earlier for our staff meeting.

I know. You think I don’t remember anything.

I don’t think that.

Outside, the sky had turned a swirling gray. Cindi tucked Baby’s face against her shoulder. Opening the door to the back seat, it whipped back and hit them both. Baby screamed. She kept screaming, arching her back, as Cindi struggled to buckle her in. She might have hurt her a little, pinched her leg with the buckle, but there was nothing she could do about it. It’s okay, it’s okay, she kept murmuring.

The rain started up again. The farther they drove, the heavier it got. Cindi was worried about the underpass. It had flooded at least once recently, but was the quickest way home. She could not think through Baby’s screams. She wondered if something else was wrong with her. Maybe mom had put one of those old-fashioned diapers on her she liked to use. Sometimes the safety pins came open. Baby was braying like a donkey, unable to catch her breath. She smelled really bad. Traffic was at a crawl, and Cindi could barely see out through the windshield.

That low moan got louder and louder, a growl filling the car like a trapped animal.

Cindi tried to gun it through a low spot, but the car lost traction, began to drift with a quick flow of water across the roadway. She felt her blood surge in fear. A truck driver in the oncoming lane blared his horn. Cindi’s car began to rotate slowly to the left as Baby screamed. Cindi realized the moan was rising from her own throat as it turned to a scream. Oh Baby.

Cindi loosened her seat belt, and struggled onto her knees, reaching back to release Baby from her car seat. She could not open her door, the rising waters holding it shut. Finally, Cindi lay on her back and kicked a window out.

Cindi squirmed out through the window, only to find herself waist deep in water, the surrounding cars and trucks beginning to float and bump into each other. The rain was so hard, she could barely see. Baby was quiet now, as though she knew her mother needed to concentrate. “It’s okay, Baby.” She held the little girl close, reassuring herself as much as Baby.

Cindi walked up the embankment and made her way to the overpass, heedless of the traffic that continued to pass her by inches. At the top, Cindi looked down to where she had left her car with everything still in it – Baby’s car seat, Cindi’s purse, her phone. She realized she was barefoot. She must have lost her shoes along the way. By now the water was beginning to close over the top of the car.

As she gazed down through the windshield, Cindi realized with a start that she could see a woman inside, lying inert in the driver’s seat. It must be someone else’s car. Where was hers?

Cindi looked at the child in her arms. All she held was Baby’s coat. Baby was not there. “Baby! Where’s Baby?” she called. By now it was dark. Cars continued to stream past Cindi as she tried to make her way back below the underpass, trying to find her car. Find Baby.

Time passed, and the waters began to subside. The light was failing, and Cindi had trouble seeing. A dense fog had settled over everything. Cindi could hear a police radio down the street, where police cars and flashing lights surrounded a barrier keeping drivers away from the scene. She kept wiping her eyes, as though this would make Baby appear. A tow truck came and the driver hooked her car up to it. There was no one inside that she could see. She must have imagined the body. Cindi stood by the side of the road all night. She did not feel tired, and did not know where to go. “I have to think,” she said to herself. “I have to go to the police. I have to find Baby.” She kept trying to remember those final moments in the car. How she picked up Baby How she got out. But she could not.

And she would not go to the police if she had left Baby behind. She imagined being taken to her parents’ home like this, without Baby. She imagined the things her mother would call her, would accuse her of.

She did not leave the intersection.

A day passed, and the underpass was swept out and reopened to traffic. Cindi crouched by one end of the underpass, her arms wrapped around herself, wet and dirty, barefoot, watching each car as it entered the tunnel, looking for Baby. No one seemed to notice her.

Night fell.

Cindi stood and realized she was rooted to this place, that she could not stop looking for Baby. Ever. The whine started in the pit of her stomach. Up through her chest, it rose to a growl in her throat. It burst out of her mouth and filled the street, echoed down the tunnel below the overpass, down the dank asphalt byways, the water still draining down the walls of stained stucco buildings, down the alleys and sidewalks and gutters of the old downtown.

“Baby!” she called. “Baby.”

Kathleen Alcalá is the author of six books, most recently, The Deepest Roots: Finding Food and Community on a Pacific Northwest Island. A member of Los Norteños Writers, she is a founding editor of The Raven Chronicles and a member of the Opata Nation. Her first novel, Spirits of the Ordinary, will be back in print in 2021.“Kathleen’s craft illuminates the souls of her characters: the Mexican women who carry the universe in their hearts.” – Rudolfo Anaya.

from FLIGHT RISK, a novel

Posted on by

Pregnancy makes you tired, they say.  It’s the effort of making all those new cells, I suppose—those tiny, translucent organs—that consumes your energy at a bone-deep level.  Every moment seems like a good time for a nap.  Sofas beckon.

I’ve seen other women’s sonograms:  the small twin lungs, the dark heart beating.  At night, I close my eyes and see them, those hummingbird hearts.  A few breaths later, I’m dreaming:  open grassland, oceans softly rocking. 

Nothing we can manufacture with our hands or our brains is so delicate and intricate, yet it all unfolds without our thought or will.  Week seven: a beating heart.  Week nine:  nipples, elbows.  Week twenty-two:  eyelashes.  Your body, doing all that. 

Whether you want it to or not.

They say exhaustion hovers just above you like a blanket, ready to drop, ready to smother all those things you thought were so important:  your career, your household chores, your circle of friends, the yoga class that seemed so crucial at the time. . . .  Everything melts away.  You’re an incubator, nothing but, your body a traitor to all your old causes.  Equal pay for equal work, environmental justice, safety on the streets:  very nice, but all you really crave is sleep—endless, luxuriant bouts of afternoon sleep, stretched out on the bed in a long rhombus of warm sun.

You arrange your limbs for comfort.  Slumber closes down over you like a drug.  You dream of a baby gazing up from your arms, curls shining, eyes radiant with love.

Then you wake, gasping for breath.

•

The legacy from my mother is seventeen things.

1. A small white house in the hills of West Virginia.  The paint, fading even in my childhood, surely curls back now, peeling away in long crumbling strips, exposing bare wood to the elements.  Home.  The nest.  The scene of the crime.  No one lives there now except the wild things.

2. A craving for nicotine.  I chew gum, fiddle with paper clips, gnaw ends of yellow pencils.

3. A thirst for hard liquor.

4. A taste for rough men.  Hers were bikers and truckers.  Mine were attorneys, surgeons, sons of wealthy families, boxers, men who owned boats.  All self-declared masters of their various universes.  They seemed powerful, bold, magnetic.  Control is sexy, until it’s not.  Married now two years to Jon—a Darcy, a Knightley, a truly good man—I like to think I have outgrown this particular inheritance. 

5. A hunger to run.

6. A taste for cheap food.  Hamburger Helper.  Kool-Aid.  Oscar Mayer.  Uniform slices of pink, rubbery bologna, red-rimmed, smeared with mayonnaise, squashed between spongy white slices of bread.  Tuna casserole made with cream of mushroom soup and gray canned peas, with potato chips crumbled on top.  Heinz ketchup squeezed onto Kraft macaroni and cheese and stirred with a fork until orange. 

In Jon’s circle, such things aren’t eaten.  They’re punchlines, the stuff of aghast remarks.  I cook them alone in the kitchen at night, after he’s fallen asleep, and eat standing up at the counter, staring out over the black lake.

7. A suspicion of the state and its services.  Social workers.  Police.  Anyone who wants to help us.

8. Silence.  What you don’t say can’t haunt you.  Plead the Fifth.

9. A love of dark licorice, sweet like danger.  In my childhood, it was an exotic treat, rare and expensive—a delicacy, a thing that miraculously appeared at Christmas and birthdays or in the pockets of the men my mother saw.  I’m told the taste for licorice is hereditary.  You like it or you don’t.

10. My long-boned, capable hands.  They can change a tire, build a table, twist stuck lids off jars.  Break a limb.

11. A belief in ghosts.

12. A jumpy metabolism.  Skittish.  My friends here in Chicago often ask what diet I’m on (or, more quietly, which pill I take—and where can they get some?).

13. A fear of incarceration, whether by reason of insanity or crime.

14. A love of fairy tales.  She used to read them to me at bedtime.  I would touch the illustrations with my finger while her scratchy voice unspooled the tale.

15. A fear of children.  Their messes.  Their perpetual demands.  Their softness.  The terrible fragility of their bodies.

16. A tiredness, bedded down deep in my bones.  Even before I was old enough to drink, I woke in the mornings exhausted, worn and bleak, thinking, Another day?  An old woman inside a young girl.  And in my mother’s eyes:  that same look.

17. Grief.  Like an ocean.  Like madness.

Joy Castro is the author of the memoir The Truth Book (2005), the essay collection Island of Bones (2012), and the short fiction collection How Winter Began (2015), all from the University of Nebraska Press, and of two literary crime novels set in post-Katrina New Orleans, Hell or High Water (2012) and Nearer Home (2013), both from Thomas Dunne/Macmillan. My work has won the Nebraska Book Award and the International Latino Book Award and been a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award. My short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in journals including Ploughshares, Seneca Review, Indiana Review, Afro-Hispanic Review, Gulf Coast, Brevity, and The New York Times Magazine.

Sometimes I Fall Asleep in my Mother’s Garden and Remember Us Picking in Fields

Posted on by

By Margarita Cruz

Squash blossom my tongue to the sky,
We all fall upwards down here:
Eyelids squish rottenfruit heavy
dirt clods fall
flames brush eyelash.
Destroy gardens – they locust
      small flies, some say
            – the west is disappearing –

Under this peach tree, corn stalk
            roots entangle amid
moonflowers as they climb,
crawl all over.
            Their vines mice tail onto
dried carcasses, peach and somewhere
strawberry
            Pick the season:
Fall here is orange,
            only desert
            to yellow.
&thewest is hiding
under fevered limbs –
The whole pasture
            on fire ,
Cinders crunch under – worming fingers – swimming soil

Margarita Cruz recently received her MFA in Creative Writing from Northern Arizona University. Former editor-in-chief of Thin Air Magazine, she is currently a columnist for Flagstaff Live!. She serves as Vice President to the Northern Arizona Book Festival and as an editorial assistant for Tolsun Books. Her works have been featured in Miracle Monocle, Chapter House Journal, and the Susquehanna Review. Find what she’s up to at shortendings.com.