Giménez Smith - Be recorder: poems

Graywolf Press Copyright 2019 by Carmen Gimnez 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 authors 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 Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto Me ha dado el sonido y el abecedario Violeta Parra

People sometimes confuse me for someone else they know because theyve projected an idea onto me.

Ive developed a second sense for thissome 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 youre someone else. In graduate school a teacher called me by another womans name with not even brown skin, but what you might call a brown name.

The housewives on television and their bottles of winewhose corks laid in a single row would circumnavigate three complete orbits around the sunare only teaching us how hard the human zoo of the middle class can be. The housewives on television and their bottles of winewhose corks laid in a single row would circumnavigate three complete orbits around the sunare 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 aai 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 wont, 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 womens faces and husbands and poor choices, quietly because were not paid or rewarded to and could face criminal or civil action.

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 Im 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. infect my window while I sleep, and Im 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 boys wolf life, the dream of skulking along streets with hunger and immunity. I wanted to cup the moons curve in my hand like it belonged to me, that was how young I was.

I am the puppet a girl flops around in her dollhouse, and I represent her anger. Im daughter and teacher and cousin too. Im brother and Papa Smurf is baby. The girls 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. Ive 3,000 roles in the air ready for the girls next endeavor. In the next room, this girl becomes a poet, both brilliant and mean.

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 minds queen. Weve 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. Shes 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.