Note to the Reader on Text Size
slippery I’m post-post-post I’m greedy I’m double-crossing I’m delusional
We recommend that you adjust your device settings so that all of the above text fits on one line; this will ensure that the lines match the author’s intent. If you view the text at a larger than optimal type size, some line breaks will be inserted by the device. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a small indent.
BE RECORDER
ALSO BY CARMEN GIMÉNEZ SMITH
Cruel Futures
Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@Writing
(with John Chávez)
Milk and Filth
Goodbye, Flicker
The City She Was
Can We Talk Here
Reason’s Monster
Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else
Odalisque in Pieces
BE RECORDER
poems
Carmen Giménez Smith
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2019 by Carmen Giménez Smith
The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-55597-848-8
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-892-1
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2019
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958160
Cover design: Mary Austin Speaker
Cover art: Daniel Martin Diaz
For Mark Wunderlich
CONTENTS
ONE: Creation Myth
ORIGINS
WATCH WHAT HAPPENS
BOY CRAZY
PLAY THERAPY
SELF AS DEEP AS COMA
SOUTHERN CONE
CURRENT AFFAIRS
INTERVIEW FOLLOW-UP
NO APOLOGY: A POEMIFESTO
FLAT EARTH DREAM SOLILOQUY
TWO: Be Recorder
BE RECORDER
THREE: Birthright
IN REMEMBRANCE OF THEIR LABORS
AS BODY II
I WILL BE MY MOTHER’S APPRENTICE
BEASTS
ENTANGLEMENT
AMERICAN MYTHOS
ON TEACHING
TERMINAL HAIR
ONLY A SHADOW
ARS POETICA
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto
Me ha dado el sonido y el abecedario
Violeta Parra
ONE • Creation Myth
ORIGINS
People sometimes confuse me for someone else they know
because they’ve projected an idea onto me. I’ve developed
a second sense for this—some call it paranoia, but I call it
the profoundest consciousness on the face of the earth.
This gift was passed on to me from my mother who learned it from
solid and socially constructed doors whooshing inches from her face.
It may seem like a lie to anyone who has not felt the whoosh, but
a door swinging inches from your face is no joke. It feels like being
invisible, which is also what it feels like when someone looks
at your face and thinks you’re someone else. In graduate school
a teacher called me by another woman’s name with not even
brown skin, but what you might call a brown name. That sting
took years to overcome, but I got over it and here
I am with a name that’s at the front of this object, a name
I’ve made singular, that I spent my whole life making.
WATCH WHAT HAPPENS
The housewives on television and their bottles
of wine—whose corks laid in a single row
would circumnavigate three complete orbits
around the sun—are only teaching us how hard
the human zoo of the middle class can be.
We have organic and TV and Spanx and TV
and kale and açai and also pills for penises to get even
harder. TV. And Toyotas and Febreze and Blue Apron.
The housewives nitpick their daughters, throw drinks
we won’t, blackball the mean mom we wish we could.
Meanwhile, we aspire to live in houses that mansiony
and to live through our daughters and we
tear down other women’s faces and husbands
and poor choices, quietly because we’re not paid
or rewarded to and could face criminal or civil action.
If I were a reality TV actress, maybe in my 60s
and I had changed my face, and the old face haunted
me or if, as I got older, maybe 72, I wanted to see
what it would look like if I had remained the original face,
I would pitch a new show called Back in Time, which
would chronicle my return to the invisibility of civilian life.
BOY CRAZY
The echoes of sirens and cicadas,
and the drunk boys who howl
into the trees at 2 a.m. infect
my window while I sleep,
and I’m pulled into a girl I once was,
calling for love into a sky transected
by power lines until sunrise when the town
tightened into itself. I prayed for a boy’s
wolf life, the dream of skulking along
streets with hunger and immunity.
I wanted to cup the moon’s curve
in my hand like it belonged to me,
that was how young I was.
PLAY THERAPY
I am the puppet a girl flops around in her dollhouse,
and I represent her anger. I’m daughter and teacher
and cousin too. I’m brother and Papa Smurf is baby.
The girl’s made a ratty mattress from a red quilt patch.
The pillow is a dirty cotton ball where I reenact the scene
of her father (Ken) weeping into her breasts. Then
she pulls the arms off of him, then I stop being her
and go down to the kitchen to be a mother who is quiet,
and martyred, and the both of us make meals
from our symbiotic tragedy. I’ve 3,000 roles
in the air ready for the girl’s next endeavor. In the next
room, this girl becomes a poet, both brilliant and mean.
SELF AS DEEP AS COMA
When I was a girl, I thought clouds were God,
and that we dialogued about sin,
which mirrored my desires. When our talks
made me paranoid, I counted the letters
in each word I heard, turned them backward
or rearranged them alphabetically to dodge
the
buzz of my head. Other times
I was the satyr side of the coin and the air
around me felt like jewels.
Then abyss. Pulling the hair
from my head and a type of catatonia.
My family thought I should lift myself
with mind, lift myself
from the bed, from the couch, as if the body
were the mind’s queen. We’ve seen
the world, my family would tell me. In the world
suffering is hunger, war, disease, they said,
and because those calamities were terrible,
I was ashamed for the insignificance of mine.
What I had I had made, they said,
and I should cast it off like a snake molting skin,
so I would try, each of my atoms a ton,
which led to a thought experiment at eleven, death
by pills. I survived, woozy but alive. No scar left,
no redemption or courage, just shame so dark
my ancestors called from the fathoms
to ask why I sought out their shadows.
To end a conversation, tell a story of suicide
with a girl in it. She’s a ghost desperate for absolution.
When I was a girl, I wilted or blew. I burrowed into pain.
When I was a girl, I thought my storm would suck me
into its eye and uncoil me from what I was.
When I was a girl, I worried about who knew I knew.
I worried who I could hurt, so I hid myself.
We are storms and bargains
with heaven, pulses of electricity moving
within infinite networks.
So much fallibility. What do we bear
that comes just from the world?
And then what comes from inside us?
We bear everything. Each part.
I loved the part when the world was
my torrid lover seduced by the blue blaze
beaming from my body. My eye helped me
plow through the living room like a comet.
I could burn down or out or err,
and I could be such a good poet in it
sometimes. I liked how brilliant
the light words emitted, stars I arranged
in a sky like a god who would fall to the earth
having made something beautiful and vainglorious.
Sometimes those were the days, the ones
I could hold still long enough to arrange
stars without the burn. But I cannot.
I have in me a buried spark. I buried it myself.
When I was a girl, I collected reams of paper, soothed
by the white over and over, the hope of starting
from blank. I hoped to endure being well enough,
to conjure a new bright vessel because I wanted to live.
SOUTHERN CONE
I wept with my grandmother when Reagan
was shot because that’s what she wanted.
At night, she’d tell me about a city built
by Evita for children in Buenos Aires, the city
of her first exile. Children went about
municipal duties in the small post office
and mini city hall to learn to be good citizens.
In Argentina she sold bread pudding
and gave French and English lessons from her
home for money to buy shoes. She promised
we’d go someday, but we never did. She’d say
Peruvians were gossipy, Argentinians snobbish, but
Chileans were above reproach. A little bit migrant,
a little bit food insecurity, she was the brass bust
of JFK on her altar, the holy card of Saint Anthony
on her TV. She was her green card and the ebony cross
above her bed. The lilted yes when she answered
the phone, and the song she liked to hum about bells
and God that ended tirin-tin-tin-tirin-tin-tan: miles
and ages away from her story, she sang it.
CURRENT AFFAIRS
A mob slid like protozoa
across the palace plaza,
a Greek choral malignancy,
treacly and pulsing while
a cannon sponsored by Red
Bull shot out T-shirts
with GPS tracking in the Make
America Great Again stitching.
We screamed yasssssssss
for a decade and that is
what had happened.
INTERVIEW FOLLOW-UP
I’m a very hard worker, so how much
will you pay to tuck me into your
pocket? My qualifications are that
I am an immigrant mother once removed thus
motivated to ruthlessly carry my babies to the top.
I resign myself to this mortification
for passage into the Amazon marketplace
with my good people skills and killer drive.
Available immediately. Fine print: you can own
my labor, but not my defiance. You can shape
my toil into a robot with nearly real skin,
but you can’t touch the feeble efforts I make to retaliate.
NO APOLOGY: A POEMIFESTO
Isn’t there a line by Yusef Komunyakaa, “I apologize for the eyes
in my head.” Maybe what I am trying to say is that I apologize
for the sight in my eyes. Susan Briante
I would love to make a proposal, and it is out of love,
not patronizing love but true revolutionary love, and it won’t
upset the orbit tomorrow. So here’s where I’d like
to begin, and this might be the hardest thing you’ve tried to do,
or maybe you already do it and I’m grateful for you
because you’ve inspired me. I know it’s the hardest thing
for me because I haven’t done it consistently (not at all, sorry),
but I want to recommend that we stop apologizing.
Today I counted and I said I’m sorry approximately 22 times.
I apologized for my setting my stuff down on the counter at Kroger.
I apologized for being behind someone at a copy machine.
I apologized for someone else bumping into a stranger.
I apologized for taking longer than a minute to explain an idea.
Suffice it to say I am sorry all the time.
I won’t tell you what to do because that makes me
an implicit solicitor of sorry. Personally,
when the word comes into my mouth, I’m going to shape it into
a seed to plant in another woman’s aura as love. I only ask
that we get started. This is our first step toward world domination.
FLAT EARTH DREAM SOLILOQUY
I like the skeptical credo of Flat Earth—the bits about reinventing knowledge, but I hate the part about borders and brutalism. With a photo of the horizon taken from a plane and Photoshop you can swarm science with swagger. A Flat Earth makes water endless, and any talk of hardship is theater, and it will never let us down, and drinking urine can save your life, and other ones I can’t remember. The Earth is flat because that suits capitalism; I haven’t figured out how. When I’m at Target and, say, I’m in the soup aisle, I try to guesstimate the calories. I calculate there are a thousand different cans of soup that on average are about 300 calories a can, so that’s 300,000 calories, which is about I would say 85 or so pounds meant for someone’s body, and that’s just one solitary aisle and not a very caloric one. So many calories, so who are they meant for? Perhaps calories fall off the edges of Earth. When I was a girl, I believed every product the factory made was good for me, so I accept you, Flat Earth. Each age needs its revisions and its mass hysterias. In 1726 Mary Toft convinced people she had given birth to rabbits, an improbable scenario a lot of people believed. Also, crop circles. If we’re revising, I’d like to make some propositions: along the edg
e, sirens sing their hypnosis onto the rocky cays. You see water is endless because the edge is an infinite pool. On my Flat Earth, I walk on the surface of the ocean wielding a CGI trident and spouting the truth that feels best. What is seeing, I ask? A poet once told me I liked a theory of world I could aver with confidence. I’ll live at the edge of the Earth where those next-world sirens write a form of poem called the sapphic that’s made of drinking straws and seashell songs, despair, births, and conspiracy. We had a crisis of state, so along the edges we build a curve from the Earth into the galaxy, a renewal of her fertile potential.
TWO • Be Recorder
BE RECORDER
•
a monolith overshadows the animals
in their boxes stacked so corners stick
into corners of others for morale the animals
think about a next life while the monolith smothers
reality while a more necessary revolution awaits us
our shoes pinch made south in plastic forms
of animal skin layers of animal cells and the tiny
frays of thread meant to stitch shoes instead stitch
the lungs the fingers the stitches to fractions
of cents the kind of money to transform us all day
into new animals so how did I attain this onus
how do I break free of it or declare it my only trial
and what of the lying shark on the other
side of the door and his agenda like fill her hole
and shut her up and why insist on a skills test
that feels like gauntlet because my betters molding
me voice-over in megaphones stop thinking in the past
it’s like shitting on the giant tapestry of the nation
since that really brings us all down emphasis theirs
•
I was light from the mouth from every part of me
I was of the earth or a scar in the earth pouring through
the ruins of early civilization and I bubbled from it and
became a saint’s reptilian spirit and I could taste
Be Recorder Page 1