I lock-boxed every 50 cent piece of vending machine jewelry
still inside their acorn capsules, each one, a childhood prophecy.
I scattered holy water & salt- ed the boiling pan until it turned ocean.
Vacuumed the bird’s nest inside the fireplace, still full of fox fur
nebula colored eggs cracked like bone
china, gold filling the crevices. I’ve always filled time this way.
But I left the front door open & cats gathered on the lawn.
They left koi on the porch in piles & hid mice in the flower pots.
I would have flooded the street in candlelight had I known you’d be here so soon.
I would have hidden my fists in my pockets, until compressed diamonds.
I would have traded diamonds for starlight.
I would have made the world give itself up to you. I would have
welcomed you to never leave
Laura Villareal earned her MFA from Rutgers University-Newark. In 2018 her chapbook The Cartography of Sleep was published by Nostrovia! Press. Her writing has appeared in AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She has received scholarships and fellowships from National Book Critics Circle, Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts, Key West Literary Seminar, and The Highlights Foundation.
Roger doesn’t want to go to see his sister. He clenches his
jaw and continues hitting the ball into the hockey net. He is outside playing
ball hockey by himself. It is cold out and the leaves are beginning to turn.
The weather has cooled dramatically from one day to the next. Only yesterday he
was wearing a t-shirt while out with his friends. Fall is fickle that way. This
November wind could freeze your fingers if you aren’t dressed for the weather.
His blue jacket is thin, but the physical exercise keeps him warm. He focuses
on the ball.
His foster mom yells out to him from the living room window.
She is leaning against the ugly brown couch that blocks all of the light coming
into the house. She shouts through the window screen, her words muted by the
wind blowing in his ears. Roger, it’s time to go and see your sister, she is
saying, it’s time to go say goodbye. He ignores her and continues to hit the
bright orange ball into the empty hockey net. He is comforted by the sound of
the wooden stick scraping its edge against the concrete road beneath him.
Methodical sounds have always soothed him.
She’s family, he thinks as he slams the hockey stick into the
ball once again. Why is he dreading this so much? The knot in his stomach is
tightening, telling him that it doesn’t matter, so what if she is family? HIs
breath comes in short gasps now. He’s so angry, he can’t breathe. He sees, in
his mind’s eye, his foster mom, sitting there, having tea and cookies with the
social worker. As if this is just another regular day. Their laughter rings out
from the window. They are waiting for the hour to take him to see his sister so
that he can say goodbye to her, forever. His anger makes him tremble and he
hits that ball so hard he tips the net over.
He’s leaning down onto his thighs, now, to catch his breath.
And he’s thinking about what he has to do. How is he going to say goodbye? This
makes him angrier even than the time they took him away from Molly when he was
eight.
His foster dad is standing on the sidewalk facing the road
where the boy is slamming his anger out onto that tiny ball. He stands there
with his hands in his pockets, not saying a word. He’s supposed to come out
here and tell him it’s time to go, but he doesn’t. He can’t. He knows how hard
it will be on the boy and he’d rather just give him a few more minutes.
The boy picks up the fallen net and begins slamming that ball
into it again. Let him get it out of his system, the foster dad thinks. Roger
stops suddenly and looks to his dad. He is breathing hard as he turns back and
stares at the empty net. He drops the stick and grabs the ball, puts it into
his jacket pocket and turns towards their car without saying a word. They both
walk in silence towards the car.
“I’ll find you, Francis. I swear I will.” Those are the words
he is saying to himself as the car pulls onto the open field. The sky is grey,
and he sees his sister standing there, looking so small and lost in her green
rubber boots, her brown tights and her blue dress. He’s forgotten how small she
is, because five years have passed. She must be nine now. She is wearing a
faded yellow sweatshirt that is one size too big for her, with the words Beach
Bum across the front. She looks unwanted. He tightens his mouth and looks away.
Francis’ pin straight brown hair is in her eyes as she leans
her head forward towards her chest. Roger can’t tell if she’s crying or not,
but he suddenly feels like telling her to run as fast as she can. A small noise
comes alive in his throat, but then dies and sits there, in silence.
They are both being adopted out to new homes. The news came just
a few days ago. Adoption, when you have been in the system for a long time, is
like winning the lottery. But he doesn’t feel like celebrating. He feels like
someone has punched him in the stomach. He wants to be happy with the news of
the adoption. Because he hopes that the new home will make him feel less
afraid, less unsure of everything. More wanted. He needs the stability of a
home, a place for him to feel safe, to feel like himself again.
Since he was a kid, he’s always felt like a loner. Molly, just
a kid herself when she had him, pushed him into being the man of the house
because she just couldn’t cope. So, he was responsible for taking care of the
six of them, the six siblings. He doesn’t even want to think about the other
four, the younger ones who were sent to other foster homes. He doesn’t even
know where they are. But he and Francis, they were sent out into the system
together. And they kept in touch. And now, his sister standing here in this
field, she’s being sent away. Really far away.
Francis’ brown eyes still can’t find his. Her head is down as
she fiddles with her sweatshirt’s zipper. He kneads the ball inside his jacket
pocket, it’s helping him to stay calm and not cry. The social worker is saying
something to his foster dad as they lean against her brown station wagon. Why
are they in this field? There are farmhouses and barns all along the ridge line
but nothing else really, for miles and miles. It’s a strange place to say
goodbye.
“Come on you two, we don’t have all day. Go on, hug her. Hug
your sister Roger. Tell her goodbye.”
He moves towards Francis with what feels like lead inside his
legs and she looks up. He knows those eyes like he knows that the sun will come
up tomorrow morning. They remind him of their mother, of Molly, when she would
look straight into his eyes and tell him he was her little man. This was before
she started drinking and before she would go out for hours at a time and leave
them alone to fend for themselves. Before the police were called and social
services decided all the kids were better off in other homes.
Francis looks like a scared rabbit and again he has the urge
to tell her to run. She pushes her bangs away from her eyes and smiles shyly at
him, smiling with pride at her older brother. He nods to her that it’s okay and
she runs towards him. She clings to him, letting out an exasperated sob, the
kind that keeps inside of you like a clenched fist. He knows that her throat
must feel like a raw wound because he’s been there. The desperation of loss
clinging to your throat like a sickness. She’s crying uncontrollably now. He
hugs her to him, tight.
“I’ll come and find you Francis. I swear it.”
A little lie he tells her to try to make her feel better. Or
maybe to make himself feel better. He can feel her hot face pressing against
his stomach as she holds onto him for dear life. She is sobbing now, and he
can’t make out what she is saying. The social worker is trying to pry her away
from him and he is standing like a statue, frozen in place. The social worker
finally disentangles her and pushes her towards the car. Francis doesn’t turn
back to face him, and he can see that her shoulders have fallen all the way
down by her knees.
Roger is silent on the walk back to the car. He gets in first
and stares out across the field as the station wagon with Francis inside,
drives away. The silence in the car is deafening as his foster dad traverses
the front to get into the driver’s seat.
“I got to pee. Can we stop here?”
Roger says this while the car is driving past a forest of
trees on both sides of the road. He stands amongst the trees and tries hard to
pee but can’t. Suddenly, up ahead he sees a deer, caught in the headlight of
his vision. The two share a moment of recognition, of understanding. About how
life is not fair and that sometimes someone has to die in order for things to
be better. He zips his pants back up and takes out the orange ball from his
pocket. He whips it across, and it slams into the neck of the deer. He jumps
back in surprise, at his strength? At his precision? At his audacity? The deer
jumps up and twists its head in mangled shock and bolts towards the highway. A
car coming fast in the opposite direction is suddenly overtaken by the deer
that is running frantically for its life. There is the screech of tires and a
loud blast of a horn and the car is suddenly on its side in the ditch between
the road and the forest.
Roger watches his foster dad running across to road to the
overturned car. It is the brown station wagon that faced them in the field. His
foster dad is calling for him, but he can’t hear a word, he just sees the man’s
mouth moving and everything is in slow motion.
A lone green rubber boot lies against the asphalt as the
medics and the firemen try to pry the car doors open. There is nothing but the
sound of an incessant horn blaring into the dusk’s embrace. Nothing but the
sound of a silent scream bellowing into the never-ending night.
Marilo Nuñez is a Chilean Canadian playwright, director, and writer. She was the founding Artistic Director of Alameda Theatre Company, a company dedicated to developing the new work of Latinx Canadian playwrights. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and is a Ph.D. candidate in Theatre & Performance Studies at York University. Her work has been published in The New Quarterly, Canadian Theatre Review, and Playwrights Canada Press. Her short story “We All Want to Change the World” has been turned into a podcast @Line720. Follow her on Twitter @marilonunez99.
If
your count is right (it is), the world has ended for us three times now. You
want to mean something big by us, like all millennials or something. But thanks
to all the infographics that keep coming up on your Twitter feed saying who is
doing what in all this, you now know you’re not even a millennial but a Gen-Z.
You feel weirdly betrayed by this fact. From what you gather, Gen-Z say like
a lot in and eat tide pods. You do say “like” a lot. “Us” can only exist within
your life frame, 1997-2020, within your reality, within your country, family,
etc. Some us are bigger than others and you’re not sure that means anything.
The
first time the world ended, you were too young to understand it. It rained for
days. You slept with your 19-year-old mother and 1-year-old brother and many
other families in a church, on the floor, wrapped tightly with grown-up’s
jackets and sweaters that smelled like sweat and sun. In candle-light, the
older women tell stories, scary stories, from their own piece of floor or
mattress. You will grow to know these stories and people who have sighted the
characters in them, La Sucia and La Llorona and La Lechuza.
Your
father and other men had to stay behind, looking after the flooded vacant
houses in case los ladrones came in the night to steal, taking advantage of the
hurricane. Military helicopters dropped supplies every other day. One of them
crashed down. The mayor of the city was in it. He died. The world was brown and
underwater and murky. And then it wasn’t. Ten-thousand people died, faceless,
drowned by a hurricane with an English name, Mitch. Killed by something
they couldn’t even pronounce or spell. You are glad it wasn’t named Maria or
Pedro or Juan. Many more would’ve died if the beast had been namesakes with our
cousins, our mothers, ourselves. We wouldn’t have been afraid. But Mitch? Mitch
sounds like any gringo motherfucker ready to spit on your face. Spit until you
and yours drown.
The
second time, on June 28, 2009, you were still too young to understand but old
enough to be afraid. You wake up that Sunday and there is no power, where the
incessant drone of the old fridge and the voices from your grandmother’s
telenovela usually are, there is nothing. Silence. Maybe a rooster or a bird.
And then, suddenly, a helicopter, far away. Your mother’s and grandmother’s
voices. An explosion, another one, and then a ring. A ring so high-pitched it
must have cut all the trees in the mountain you live in half, with the
precision of a saw. For weeks, everyone stays home. At first, we use the time
to clean the house over and over. To open drawers that we haven’t in years, to
throw out shoes and hats older than you. At night, your family, like many
others across the country, uses a battery-powered radio to listen out for the
name of those that have been killed and, at 9 PM, tune in for Cuentos y
Leyendas de Honduras, a 90-minute long radio show in which Jorge Montenegro
narrates the stories you heard all those years ago, at night, in a church full
of people. There are sound-effects this time, whistles that stand in for wind
and thunder for the most dramatic moments.
But
this deteriorates quickly. Soon, everyone’s hair starts to look like an old
toothbrush. There really isn’t any food or water, but not because people rushed
to the stores and took it all. The stores were burnt. The fast-food
American-chain restaurants too. When you finally leave your house again, all
that remain are the bones of these places. Half of a McDonalds arch, a
vandalized Burger King wall, a broken yellow slide from a Wendy’s playground.
Vaguely, you understand your country doesn’t have a president anymore and
people are being killed and many are missing. Vaguely, you remember throwing up
in that same yellow slide once, during a birthday party.
The
last time is now, of course. Old enough to understand and be afraid. It reminds
you of both last times and it’s also bigger, global. And this time, you tell
the stories. La Lechuza, La Llorona, La Sucia. But the people reading this
could google those stories if they cared for them, so instead you tell them
like this.
Trade
these like playing cards, lotería cards, que se yo. It doesn’t matter.
La
Llorona, the woman who caught her husband cheating, drowned their two children,
and then herself. Denied entry to heaven until finding her sons’ souls, she
stalks children near rivers, ready to drown them and steal their souls. She
cries for them, for the children souls she lost. “The Weeper”
I’ve
had three surgeries. For my age, I don’t know if that’s a lot or very few or
what. But what strikes me about these is that, in paper, they were all
considered aesthetic surgeries. I’m not not-vain, but this still sounds weird
to me. I’ve also paid for them all out-of-pocket, myself. The first was the
removal of a dark, somewhat hairy mole. It was the size of a Coca-Cola bottle
cap. It rested, unbothered, on the right side of my chin. It was carved out of
my face using local anesthesia. Years later, I forget I ever had it, and I
also, unconsciously, will rub with my thumb the space where it used to be, up
and down, sometimes in slow circles. Hey, I know. Very sexual. By the time
other women’s clitorises came around to my life, my phantom mole had given me
all the training I needed.
The
second time was not aesthetic at all. I contracted HPV from a lover. By the
time it was detected, my only treatment option was to have a sort of “cone”
carved on my cervix using a laser. I’m doing a poor job explaining this. Yes,
because of the laser, it was considered aesthetic. It burned the HPV-cells in
me. No anesthesia could be used. I bled for days. I told no one. I was 19.
Every so often, close to my days of ovulation, I will feel the faintest pull
under my belly-button, deep inside me. I can feel the doctor pulling and
burning those cells in me.
The
third, and last, was a few days ago. Eye-muscle surgery. Local anesthesia and
some sedation. I woke up in the middle of it all as the doctor cut and snipped
the muscles behind my left eye. The nurse said, “her blood pressure is rising.”
Both my eyes were shut. Days after it, my eye is blood-red. I cry bloody tears.
I’ve never known a greater physical pain as the muscles inside my eye socket
heal and turn and adjust. My eye leaks, and leaks, and leaks. I carry a tissue
under it, permanently. I’m a weeper and I’m also missing some things, while not
children, parts of my body. Parts of me.
La
Lechuza, the shape-shifting owl-woman who clings to the ceilings over babies’
cribs, ready to suck their life out through their navel the moment parents
close the door, turn off the light. “The Owl”
I’m
young, so young I still haven’t run away from this house. My mother holds a
large, fabric-cutting scissor to my belly. Slowly and meticulously, she snips
the air above by belly-button, three times. It is as if she could really see an
umbilical cord growing from me, like an immature lemon tree.
“This
way,” she says, raising her index finger, her perfectly manicured nail, “La
Lechuza can’t pull you up. But if she does come, don’t look at her.”
Have
you ever read those fake-psychology facts that plague Twitter and Instagram?
Like, “if you wake up in the middle of the night for no reason it is because
someone was looking at you” or “the average person only uses 10% of their
brain.” To this day, when I wake up in the middle of the night, alone, I look
up immediately, convinced La Lechuza is up there, staring at me. Convinced she
must be the reason I wake up so much at night. And wouldn’t that be very
on-brand? For a woman to be the reason I cannot sleep?
The
world has ended three times, but in between those times, it has also exploded
several more. Like when, months after I do run away, my mother shows up at my
door, her eye swollen shut, her beautiful face bleeding. Or months after I move
to the United States, four men shoot her, missing barely. Or when she gets
Dengue, another plague, and when doctors try to draw blood from her veins, it
comes out in cubes, like a popped-out ice tray.
It’s
not a fictional owl-woman that wakes me. It is my mother. Even three countries
apart, the lemon tree that once grew from her navel to mine, tugs me awake. It
whispers, Bessie, only you can take care of your mamí. Bessie, your mami
never made it home. Her body will be found in a ditch tomorrow morning. Bessie,
your siblings will call you anytime now, crying. Pick up. Bessie.
If
anyone knows how to cut this haunted cord, please let me know.
La
Sucia, the woman who couldn’t get married to her lover because she had never
been baptized, so she lost her mind, especially after he found someone else and
forgot her, quickly. She never took off her wedding dress, and now she roams
the streets looking for him, dressed all in white. She haunts drunk men, luring
them as a beautiful woman and then transforming into a monster, at the very
last moment. “The Dirty”
Two
weeks ago, I woke up in San Antonio. But, for a brief moment, before I opened
my eyes even though my ears were already alive, I thought I was somewhere else.
I thought I was home. I thought I was on the bed I slept ages 11-19. In my
house, which is in another city that also is named after a Saint. A she-saint, Santa
Lucia.
It
was the rooster. The rooster tricked me for a moment, and I was home. Later that
first night, I would be tricked again. As I tried to fall asleep, and the
neighbors of my Airbnb played Ozuna and Daddy Yankee and some rancheras. I
slept like I hadn’t in a very long time, huddled by the familiar umps-umps-umps
and the clinking of beer bottles. The parallels between these Saint-named
cities were many. San Antonio is the city of the United States with the largest
majority-Hispanic population, I learned later. But, at the time, I swear I
could feel it in the air. I ate tacos every day. My traveling mates stopped
asking me what did I feel like eating.
And
then, one morning, I decided to have breakfast by myself at a Honduran
restaurant called Geneses. I ordered un desayuno tipico, with eggs and beans
and corn tortillas and plantains and chorizo and aguacate. I ate slowly. A
flat-screen T.V hung on a corner. It periodically went out, freezing, and then
came back again to a new image. The lost image forever gone. An old couple next
to me seemed to know the owners. We had the same accent.
My
uber picked me up at the front of the restaurant. “Why this place?” he
said. “Is it like Puerto Rican?” “Is it like Mexican?” “Is it like
Argentinian?” “I was so humbled when I was sent to Argentina, all those poor
families that can’t even feed their children and still choose to feed you.” “I
mean, most parts are shitholes, I’m sure you know, but there are some sights.”
Bessie F. Zaldívar is a Honduran writer and poet. She is currently getting her MFA in Fiction at Virginia Tech. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in F(r)iction, On the Seawall, Salt Hill, The Acentos Review and elsewhere. To read more of her work visit bessiefzaldivar.com
Angela MariaSpring is the owner of Duende District, a mobile boutique bookstore by and for people of color. She holds an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and you can find her recent poems in Rust + Moth, Radar Poetry, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and forthcoming in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and Pilgrimage. Her essays and reviews are at Catapult, LitHub and Tor.com. Follow her online at Twitter at @BurquenaBoricua.
Every time Mom wanted to cuss, she’d say “chuleta con papas” or “miercoles” instead of the swear words my dad muttered toward the heart of the matter.
Porks chops, potatoes, and Wednesday’s were her musical equivalent to the “Oh shit” or “dammit” she felt but never said. Meanwhile, Dad would corral cuss words from
every cardinal direction. When he would lose his reading glasses, he’d exclaim, “Where is that piece of shit?” Mom surprised us with her calm “I don’t know where you left
that piece of shit.” I always gasped, “Mom!” in response. In my dad’s most flustered moments, we joked about his ears turning red, then white and then imagined shooting steam
like a cartoon kettle. Mom somehow walked into his storm and defused the unfurling anger until the room was calm again. In witnessing, they helped me to learn to honor the profanity of the mother and the father.
Accept their balance of words to help you let go of whatever angers you have clamped all around your heart.
Juan J. Morales is the author of three poetry collections, including The Handyman’s Guide to End Times (University of New Mexico Press), winner of the 2019 International Latino Book Award. He is a CantoMundo Fellow, Editor of Pilgrimage Magazine, and a Professor and the Department Chair of English and World Languages at Colorado State University-Pueblo.
What matters is not what she confessed, but what he heard: I will never be yours. Any incongruity, violence the speed of light, lightning rage, desire punctured
by light’s split second, razor-sharp, sawtooth, light knifing through the cathedral windows at the point past lightning. The gray storm clouds of manhood
thundered through his hands, she died by them, & this poem will go no further—no familiar detour casual in its delivery—to describe the violence, unabridged.
What mattered, the locals said, was her beauty, her silhouette tortured by the decade in which women were being built & rebuilt, especially if she happened
to be Latina. A purse, shoe, & lace veil—the necessary paraphernalia of femininity gone dark into a canal. In the center of every horrible geography,
there is a man named John we run from, but the map grows legs to follow us, the map pools & lakes, oceans into an ocean to drown us, despite
attempts to drain the Gulf of Mexico from the folklore. I think of all the women buried in bodies of water. I think of the water prophetic in its churning.
liana Rocha is the 2019 winner of the Berkshire Prize for a First or Second Book of Poetry for her newest collection, The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez, forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Karankawa, her debut, won the 2014 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). The recipient of a 2020 CantoMundo fellowship and 2019 MacDowell Colony fellowship, she has had work featured in the Best New Poets 2014 anthology, as well as The Nation, Virginia Quarterly Review, Latin American Literature Today, RHINO, Blackbird, and West Branch, among others,and sheserves as contributing editor for Waxwing Literary Journal. She earned her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University and is an incoming Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Her three chihuahuas Nilla, Beans, and Migo are the loves of her life.
my cousin’s youngest son calls from Chicago we have never spoken before like this
I worry it is death but no he wants clarification
yet there is grief in his voice an urgent crack
he wants to know who we are how we got here
who came first, second, third
what their names were where they crossed and when
and what was it like and what it means to us now
it should mean something now, he says especially now
we should learn, he says, to speak Spanish again
who they were is who we are,
is who we still should be, must be
do you think it’s possible, he asks he is not yet twenty-five
Lisa Alvarez’s poetry has most appeared in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Huizache, and is forthcoming in So It Goes, the literary journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library. She grew up in and around Los Angeles but has spent the last 30 years in Orange County where she earned an MFA in fiction from UC Irvine, became a professor at the local community college and co-edited the anthology Orange County: A Literary Field Guide. During the summers, she co-directs the Writers Workshops at the Community of Writers in the California’s Sierra Nevada.
I’m still unsure how to spell granddaughter. Is it with one D, two? Hyphen or none?
It is much simpler where his ashes will be scattered: nieta. diez. hijita de mijita.
I asked if his death certificate could be written in Spanish I kept saying birth instead they kept saying English only I got stuck in in-between.
Will they know all his names?
Will they know that my mother’s father’s name was once mine in the land he was born vanished in the country where he died?
They could not spell it, could not place it on their mouths or their maps or the x where I signed.
They made no room for it on my fertile, rich, green card when we arrived.
Foreign like grand-daughter what makes me so grand, anyway? If my tears did not help him when the fire came.
So much of our history is dying.
Natalia Sylvesteris the author of two novels for adults, Chasing the Sun (2014) and Everyone Knows You Go Home (2018), which won an International Latino Book Award and the Jesse H. Jones Award for best work of fiction. Running (July 2020), her debut novel for young adults, is a 2020 Junior Library Guild Selection. Born in Lima, Peru, Natalia grew up in Florida and Texas and received a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Miami.