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  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