In my conscience I justify the game as an exchange for a little compliance, insurance against being set loose upon a metaphorical ice floe into the stars alone.
•
That night, my son couldn’t sleep because he had been obsessing over my mother’s decay which was so florid, dead and not dead, and this was the affront to him, that we all become nothing, and that bit by bit, being gets taken away from all of us.
His entire life represented only a quarter of mine, a fragment of my mother’s.
But we also have life. I held his body tight to mine so we were two, dying and living. In his body were all the forms he would take, promise and rot. Someday he would also scrutinize my dying, parse it out for his children or his beloved.
We sat in the darkness and quiet or maybe the eddy the words created. I’m crying, mama, he said, but these are tears of joy.
•
In the future, they endure for however long they can. They endure wordlessly and into many generations, each one losing its will after being ground down because almost all people are ground down, a privilege to be fresh-eyed for eternity.
Once there were swords, they would say, that made the sound of empty oil drums. Once there was a ship powered by bones that flew in the air without moving a single feather, which they had never seen. Feathers were like hair.
ON TEACHING
The coils from me to her to them
to him like when we project words
as matter temporal
or not knowing
what they were but sound
Those branches
still pulse with the plasma of exchange
a song between us
and the imbalance we tried
languidly to invert because
it was ancient I tried? I didn’t try
though it was on me?
We said to each other give me
your attention or a haunting We invented
categories of invention We asked what
the I could be today or we’d drop the I in history
all of us with our contrary certainty
The old contacts and old contracts
feel keen in my guts
My not-children my teachers
mine mine mine
TERMINAL HAIR
On the edge of a mountain in Santa Fe
my friend and I talk about how we get rid of body
hair and what it was like when we were young,
and how we don’t care as much as we used to,
and how our virility has drawn lovers to us.
Now some of our hairs come in coarse and white as
an old man’s beard. We speculate our moustaches
connect us to a remote ancestress whose moustache
was denser than ours when having a moustache
was a little easier and this legacy
softens the blow because name one actress
or model or singer or female celebrity
with a moustache. There’s that photo of Madonna
and her hairy armpits. Frida Kahlo was foreign
and transcendent so pardoned, but no one else.
The ancestress we imagine never married, or she had
lover after lover. They called her Bigote or Takachu
or La Baffi. Nobody said a word about it because they
were scared to or she lived on the edge of the town
where she was left alone and didn’t care.
Maybe she found herself a good-natured companion
who stroked her moustache and nipped at it
or shaped it with soap, and at some point
later in her life she said to herself, someday
my great-great-great-great granddaughters
will stand on a cliff and survey their vast terrains,
the wind bristling the hair above their lips.
ONLY A SHADOW
My daughter gathers the seeds she finds in our desert, calls them
spirits. The spirits are us, she says while I knead the orbs in my fingers
to call up her birth. The wind’s first thought is to free those seeds:
vessels of the tree’s worry that she’s not enough of a multiplicity,
that she will burn into the cosmos. The cosmos is no thought, no worry,
more than us, but less than wind, and the wind is only the infinite,
not the body’s death, which is, after all, only a particle, but time as formless
as space. This is only if the wind worries at all. The seed doesn’t think;
she is the doubling ambition of a vessel. In the wind, the idea
of the copy is translated by time. We were once that idea. My daughter
collects me in a box marked for spirits where I unsettle the other seeds
begging for wind so that my sound will echo a thousand miles away.
My daughter is now the pulse I toss into the wind with the seeds. Particles
of us pass over like whispers through the cosmos, upon the clatter
the wind makes. I worry that when birds take her into themselves,
she’ll become a fleck of their transience, but this is how we permeate
the cosmos, the twine of our breaths into wind, into carbon,
into the tree’s colossal fingers reaching back from inside the earth.
ARS POETICA
I’m ill I’m federal I’m on leave I’m a child of refuge I’m holy I’m a shit
I’m desperate I won’t tell you anything I’m first-gen I’m Gen X I’m tied up
I’m bipolar I’m not fertile I’m a secret I’m the now
I’m indifferent I’m a disgrace I’m funny I’m assistance I’m not saved
I was Mormon I’m atheist I’m mysterious I’m scared I’m head of household
I’m quick-tempered I’m day job I’m night-ghost I’m failure I act white
I live bankrolled I’m deliverable I’m not gang I’m crazy ex I’m
slippery I’m post-post-post I’m greedy I’m double-crossing I’m delusional
I’m above average BMI I’m hairy I’m indebted I’m weak I’m non-confrontational
I’m in therapy I’m sorry I’m empowered I don’t have a tattoo I don’t have money
I have too many ex-friends I’m agoraphobic I’m recorder
I have a valid passport I’ve never been arrested I should have been arrested
I know too much I can barely read at times I can barely rise at times
I’m gay I’m marginally fit I’m arthritic I’m flaky
I have few skills I’m salty I’m a time bomb
I’m baptized I’m dry I’m chronic pain I’m big at mom’s house
I can’t remember how many I am obstructionist I’m a Master
That was my confessional Thank you very much
NOTES
The lines attributed to Violeta Parra are from her song “Gracias a la Vida.”
Pedro Pietri’s “Puerto Rican Obituary” is a seminal work of Latinx poetry and can be found in his Selected Poetry, published by City Lights Books in 2015.
The José Esteban Muñoz quote in “In Remembrance of Their Labors” is excerpted from his essay “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs).”
The poem “Only a Shadow” was written for the Pintura/Palabra project sponsored by Letras Latinas. The poem is after the photograph ¿Sola Una Sombra? Only a Shadow (Ester IV)? by Muriel Hasbun.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Poems and prose published in this book have appeared in: The Baffler, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Cream City Review, Fence, The Georgia Review, Harper’s, Lit Hub, Mandorla, Omniverse, Ostrich Review, Other Musics: Latina Poetry, P-Queue, PEN.org, Pleiades, Poem-A-Day at poets.org, Poetry, The Rumpus, Southern Indiana Review, Syncretism & Survival: A Forum on Poetics, and Washington Square Review.
Jeff Shotts is one of the best editors around, and I’m so grateful to him for helping me see all
the possibilities in this book. I also want to thank J. Michael Martinez for always being a champion and for being the catalyst by asking me to write a poem about Latinidad and for being my Lil Keats and my brother. Special thanks to Krystal Languell who helped me see “Be Recorder” as a long poem and for being my longtime comrade in poetry. Dana Levin made the poems’ endings so much better and her good spirit always guides me. Stephanie Burt’s incredible attention to sound and sense also changed this book for the better, as did her friendship and eggy advice. Suzi, you’re my rock. Thanks for keeping me sane by being so full of life and love.
I dedicate this book to my very dearest Mark Wunderlich who has also been my brother, my hero, and my partner-in-art-and-wickedness.
I am grateful for the time to write I received from CantoMundo, the Hermitage Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and the Blue Mountain Retreat.
To the teacher/mentors/guides/heroes and always-friends and inspirations: Elmaz Abinader, Francisco Aragon, Mary Jo Bang, Marvin Bell, Virginia de Araujo, Forrest Gander, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Juan Felipe Herrera, Brenda Hillman, Barbara Neilsen, Aldon Nielsen, Margarita Luna Robles, Nathan Sheehy, and Alan Soldofsky.
I’m so grateful for my family: to Evan Lavender-Smith for reading many drafts of this long poem and helping me find the time to write it and for kind and enduring support. Jackson and Sofia, my brother Jorge and sister Monica and little Liam. Thank you to Gail Lavender, Barry Smith, and Mark Whitehead, and Jordan and Yael Lavender-Smith, Luly and Sam. Zoila Roselló, Esperanza Roselló, Coco Roselló. For Cany and Gabe and Adrian and Brandon Barron, Yolanda Roselló, Elva Rosenfeld, Claudia and Cristi Carhuayo.
And to the friends and watersoul-family who helped with this book directly or indirectly: Gina Abelkop, Rosa Alcalá, Emily Alex, Diana Arterian, Jessie Bennett, Courtney Blaskower, Sara Borjas, Daniel Borzutsky, Jenny Boully, Susan Briante, Tisa Bryant, Jack Bunting, Anthony Cody, Carolina Ebeid, Lauren Espinoza, Adam Fitzgerald, Todd Fredson, Richard Greenfield, Camille Guthrie, Juan Luis Guzmán, Sarah Gzemski, Rachel Haley Himmelheber, Lily Hoang, Eunsong Kim, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Gloria Macijewski, Dawn Lundy Martin, Farid Matuk, Erika Meitner, Celeste Mendoza, Veronica Montes, Yesenia Montilla, Dawn Murphy, Mirna Palacio Ornelas, Andrea Orzoff, Jack Owens, Deb Paredez, Khadijah Queen, Dylan Retzinger, Barbara Richardson, Joe Rodriguez, Lucinda Roy, Dominique Salas, Amy Sayres-Baptista, Sandra Simonds, giovanni singleton, Tony Stagliano, Craig Morgan Teicher, Roberto Tejada, Naima Woods Tokunow, Aïda Torresola, Sarah Vap, Madeline Vardell, Rachelle Wales, Claire Vaye Watkins, Justine Wells, and Magdalena Zurawski.
My love to Soham Patel.
CARMEN GIMÉNEZ SMITH, nacida en Bronx, New York, EEUU, y hija de un Argentino y una Peruana, has lived in New Jersey, Maryland, Northern and Southern California, Iowa, New Mexico, and Mexico City. She is a queer poet and editor who currently lives in Blacksburg, Virginia, where she is a Professor of English in Virginia Tech’s MFA program in creative writing. She received her BA in English from San Jose State University and her MFA from the University of Iowa. She is founder of Noemi Press and, with Stephanie Burt, poetry editor at the Nation. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and the Hermitage Foundation. She is the author of six collections of poetry including Cruel Futures and Milk and Filth, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of the lyric memoir Bring Down the Little Birds, which won an American Book Award. A CantoMundo fellow, she now serves as a co-director.
The text of Be Recorder is set in Perpetua.
Book design by Rachel Holscher.
Composition by Bookmobile Design and Digital
Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free,
30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.
Be Recorder Page 5