In the vat, the pulp would never return to what it was before. It was irreversible. There was a time I wanted to exist as a series of cyphers, to live in that impossibility of ever being put back together, by which I mean I wanted to not have a past.
*
It was a baptism of all my former selves, all trying to be redeemed. I had done wrong, I promised to do good. I dipped their heads in the water, rubbed their foreheads clean, and they all closed their eyes to receive something holy, the smell of bleach wiping everything away. They did what good Christian sinners do—disappear.
I slushed the mixture with my hands, making soft balls of pulp. In my hands, they could have been molded into anything I wanted them to be.
Fire would not do this. If I burned them, I probably would have kept the ashes and eaten them, or smeared them across my teeth and smiled at passing traffic. No one would know what I was smiling at, and they would all smile back.
*
I poured all of my names into bleach because I wanted them cleaned, sanitized, redeemed, rid of all their failures. And I thought long about the purpose of bleach—to whiten that which was not white—and my shame and disgust at how many times I thought of bleaching my own skin. All summer long, working construction to buy clothes for the school year, I wore long-sleeved shirts, large hats, bandanas around my face, and gloves. I wanted no part of my body to touch the sun, all to prevent myself from becoming any darker than I already was.
I was young; I didn’t know how to love my skin, because everyone around me said that to be beautiful meant to be what I was not.
*
I began molding the mixture into a four-legged thing. It could have been a horse, or a dog, or a cow. I wanted to make a horse, but it wouldn’t stick together.
The poet Richard Siken said that horses can run until they forget they are horses, running because that’s the only thing they can do without having to tell their bodies how to do it. I wondered what I didn’t need to tell my body how to do. When you are baptized, do you need to tell your body how to excise its sin, or does it just happen without you? Can you just toss your head back and let water, gravity, and the divine do the rest?
In that bucket I was creating a paper trail of my disappearances, of all the people that I was not. Maybe I could talk to them.
*
I made many more four-legged things and placed them in the sun to dry, to harden. I named each of them after famous lovers.
They were a record of myself that held my secrets. I could trust them never to tell what was written into them. The images and numbers were erased, but nonetheless they were there, coded. They were small vaults for which no one had the key but me—untranslatable, unbreakable.
Further Notes and Observations
They found Apá blindfolded and tied up by the side of a road. He lived. That is all I have to say about it.
At night, I press a flashlight against my stomach—the ring around it is like a small eclipse. It is no accident I am named after my father.
I love you, Daisy.
I am now six months sober, after filling in many boxes on forms with a blue pen. I want someone to take my picture, for it to feel like being touched.
I believe most in my body in the precise moment of pain, not in the reflection afterward. Memories lie to me, and this is why my body can never be a map.
I’m happiest locking myself in my room in the middle of the day and lying on the floor while playing Lana Del Rey as loud as my speaker will go, and pouring a little dirt from my houseplants into my belly button. There is always dog shit everywhere because we never bothered to house-train our two-year-old shih tzu–poodle mix. I can never keep up with anything in the house. “He hit me but it felt like a kiss,” Lana sings, and I think of the first time my father hit me, as if I owed him money.
I thought things would be better by now; now that all the family is reunited.
I am starving myself. I consider the shame of letting myself go hungry, as if it’s something I’m trying on, like a new sweater in the fluorescent light of a department store. “Chíngate pues,” I hear people tell me. I go from 180 to 110 pounds in a year. This is called “learned helplessness,” my therapist tells me.
I am slowly depriving myself of everything that gives me pleasure. Meat, alcohol, sugar, sex. I have isolated myself from the world and refuse to come out.
I consider how much I hate myself for my hunger. How I wish to disappear into nothing like my father.
Sometimes I don’t realize what I am saying, say too much, and lose friends. Or I don’t say anything for months and lose them as well. I want to know the perfect amount of myself to give to someone else.
In the morning, I make myself an espresso in a stovetop metal cup and watch the coffee pour from the little fountain on the top. I open the fridge and eat a pepper. I place the seeds under my tongue.
Standing alone in my kitchen, I think of the different ways I’ve ruined my life. Maybe I was meant to be taken in the field when Amá buried the seed, pregnant with me. Only when I lie underwater do I feel as I did before my mother left for Mexico. Even though she’s back, it is different. It is only in that underwater solitude that I can learn to blame someone else for the person I’ve become since.
In that moment I hope that rising is like a baptism, and that I will be washed clean.
I imagine that being loved is like holding my breath underwater, temporary, something I can’t hold for long. When I fell in love with Rubi, she said she loved me too, but then she left.
Though I know it will come, the feeling of rising to the surface still startles me—it’s in that moment when I’m slowly starting to realize that although I still blame myself for many things that aren’t my fault, I am still capable of being loved. She and I eventually got back together.
But I want to experience love the way I experience drowning—never coming back to the surface, never finding relief. Always just a click away from dying, which I admit is selfish, because it’s easier to be desired than to go on with the work of desiring.
I know I can swim toward tenderness, but so many times I refuse. I refuse because I imagine that stillness is part of tenderness, and if I reach that place of tenderness, I won’t know what to do with the serenity.
I open the hot container of espresso, pour it into a small cup, and raise the cup to my mouth. I burn my tongue, yell, and wake up Rubi, who is sleeping in the next room, now pregnant with our child, who we will name Julián after my Amá Julia.
My child will know his grandparents by touch and not through a screen, or through my yelling as I push the phone to his ear.
I am always looking ten seconds into the future—looking for the nearest door to run through. Always needing to move.
Rubi is in the hospital maternity ward. Rubi is wheeled away. Rubi is lying unconscious on a surgery bed, with the doctor’s hands inside her. No one expected a cesarean. They split her open and are taking things out and placing them in bags like shoes on a door rack. It doesn’t look like they will be putting them back into her. The doctor reaches in and pulls out a small pink thing covered in blood, taking his first breath of this world.
He is screaming as if he has seen the future already and knows the past. They toss him around with towels to clean him, and though milky and gray, his eyes are already open. I am probably just a blurry shape and shadow to him, softening into the empty space around me, an interchangeable thing, just as my parents were to me in Tijuana. If I, too, am like the birds packed tightly together on a tree, and if a loud noise startles me, what would be left behind on the branches?
The nurse swaddles him tight and places him in my arms while the doctor staples Rubi’s abdomen back together.
“Mijo, mijo, can you see me?” I say, and we are both shaking, as if we have either just finished, or are just getting ready to run.
Acknowledgments
This book would not exist without people who believed in me long before I believed in myself and who co
ntinue to do so in days of uncertainty. First and foremost, I would like to thank Julia Kardon, my agent and friend, who read the essay that would become this book and who had the foresight to see and help craft its vision. Here’s to many more shenanigans ahead. Equally important are my amazing editors, Sofia Groopman and Mary Gaule, who turned my chaotic ramblings into something worthwhile and to whom I am deeply grateful. Sofia, your kindness and generosity is unmatched—thank you. I feel incredibly fortunate to work with such a dedicated and talented team at Harper and further extend my thanks to the production and marketing teams, especially Emily VanDerwerken. To my family at Blue Flower Arts who have given me the support I need to focus on my work: Thank you, Alison, Barbara, and Anya.
I owe so much to Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, who asked me to write when I felt I would never write again, and made me turn to prose for answers. Thanks to the editors of the following journals, magazines, and venues for publishing the first pieces from which many of the ideas in this book originated: Buzzfeed, Construction Literary Magazine, Best American Poetry Blog, Washington Square Review, and PBS NewsHour.
I am indebted to the love of friends who helped in more ways than I can name, who either fed me, housed me, or lent me an ear when I needed it most. Eternal love to Derrick Austin for being there through difficult times, Suzi F. Garcia, Britt Bennet, Rob Bruno, Lauren Clark, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, Carolina Ebeid, Carina Del Valle Schorske, and Gabrielle Calvocoressi among too many others to name here but who know who they are. Thanks also to my therapist, Kelly Schroeder, who kept me from falling to pieces throughout this process.
To my Canto Mundo, Kundiman, and Cave Canem families who came through for me in dire times and never wavered. My family owes everything to you. Gracias especially to Ross Gay, Kazim Ali, Sarah Gambito, Nicole Sealey, Carmen Jimenez Smith, Deborah Paredes, and Celeste Guzman. To my Ashland family for uniting around a love for our craft, dedication to our students, and allowing me to continue my passion for teaching.
I feel incredibly lucky to fall under the brilliant and caring guidance of Josh McKinney and Eduardo C. Corral, who for over a decade have advised me on matters personal and professional. Endless love and gratitude for you both.
I don’t know what I did to deserve the gift of Sandra Cisnero’s generosity. Thank you for all you have done for me and for looking through this book with a fine-toothed comb. I promise to pay the kindness you have shown me forward to younger Latinx writers.
To my father, mother, sister, and brothers: My love for you is endless. We are here, finally together. Los quiero mucho. To Rafael Zarate and Basilia Ayala, who have taken me in like their own son.
And last, to my wife, Rubi, and my son, Julian, who have my entire heart. May we always run out of breath dancing.
Notes
First Movement: DACA
1. For references to the strategies of the sovereign on the body politic to assert control, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977).
2. Details adapted from Jad Abumrad in “Border Trilogy Part 2: Hold the Line,” April 5, 2018, RadioLab, produced by Matt Kielty, Latif Nasser, Bethel Habte, and Tracie Hunte, podcast, MP3 audio, 51:53, https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/border-trilogy-part-2-hold-line.
Third Movement: Sentence Served
1. Merriam-Webster, s.v. “decimate,” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/decimate.
2. Line adapted from and in dedication to C. D. Wright’s ShallCross (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2016).
3. From the opening line of Federico García Lorca’s poem “Romance sonámbulo,” in The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca (1955; repr., New York: New Directions, 2005).
4. All historical details of the “El Paso solution” and others found here come from David Dorado Romo, Ringside Seats to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juárez, 1983–1923 (El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos, 2005).
5. From Form I-485, Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status, Department of Homeland Security.
Fourth Movement: Glass
1. List form adapted from Danez Smith’s poem “Alternate Names for Black Boys,” in [Insert] Boy (Portland, OR: Yesyes Books, 2014).
2. “U and T Visa Law Enforcement Guide for Federal, State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial Law Enforcement, Prosecutors, Judges and Other Government Agencies,” Department of Homeland Security, https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/U-and-T-Visa-Law-Enforcement-Resource%20Guide_1.4.16.pdf, p. 4.
3. “A federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement agency, prosecutor, judge, or other government official can complete [a certification] for a victim who is petitioning USCIS for a U visa.” Ibid., p. 5.
4. “The decision whether to sign a certification is at the certifying agency’s discretion. Each certifying agency should exercise its discretion on a case-by-case basis consistent with applicable U.S. laws and regulations, and the policies and procedures outlined in this guide as well as any internal policies of the certifying agency.” Ibid., p. 6.
Fifth Movement: Asylum
1. UN General Assembly, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 10 December 1948.
About the Author
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the author of Cenzontle, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize (BOA editions) and Dulce, winner of the Drinking Gourd Prize (Northwestern University Press). As the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan, he was a co-founding member of the Undocupoets Campaign, which successfully eliminated citizenship requirements from all major first-poetry book prizes in the nation. He lives in Northern California, where he teaches poetry to incarcerated youth and is on the faculty at the Ashland University Low-Res MFA program.
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Cenzontle
Dulce
Copyright
children of the land. Copyright © 2020 by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Digital Edition JANUARY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-282560-5
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-282559-9
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