Read an Excerpt
The Verging Cities
Poems
By Natalie Scenters-Zapico The Center for Literary Publishing
Copyright © 2015 Natalie Scenters-Zapico
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-885635-44-0
CHAPTER 1
CON/VERGE
Un cómplice perfecto. Un hermano gemelo. Hable de ser diferente, de descubrir algo importante. Algo por que pelear. Algo por que vivir. Lo que sea, una boca, una mirada, una mirada, un trato, un pacto: nunca separarnos.
A perfect accomplice. A twin. I talked about being different, about discovering something important. Something to fight for. Something to live for. Anything, a mouth, a look, a look, a deal, a pact: never split up.
— Voy a Explotar / I'm Gonna Explode (film 2008)
CROSSING
Angel buys a passport made at a print shop for fifty dollars — perfect but for a hair stuck in the laminate by his date of birth. Not noticeable,
he says and I believe him. We walk across the bridge to Ciudad Juárez and I expect there to be an explosion — for the streets to glow red.
It's been five years since we've been back and the city is a ghost, but the traffic is alive. It's still a city, I say. Let's go to a bar, he says.
We pose in faux fur with cigarettes for nightlife pictures, get vicious, and leave at 3:00 a.m. I stumble in my platform heels and stop
at another bar to get drinks one last time in a to-go cup. By 3:30 I turn litterbug and throw our empties into the ink-stained street.
I brush my hands against the chain-link fence as we cross the bridge back to El Paso. Cameras every ten feet — we smile
and kiss for them. Behind us a man yells, That's it? That's all you have for me,murder capital of the world? Border agents wave us across —
I'm too white to tell and Angel looks clean enough, but one of us is illegal. No one says a word — we all breathe pollution. To think we didn't need
to get a visa. To think we could have saved the fifty dollars. Still easy, we laugh and agree to cross again next weekend. We wonder
why we call each other Cielo, why we call each other Angel? We wonder how two cities are split, how they swell. Watch how they collide.
HOW BORDERS ARE BUILT
You lay me on blue sheets. I put two fingers in my mouth and they disappear. In your hair a crown of border patrol point their guns at me; they watch with night vision goggles to see if I'll wade across our river. I lick
the black corners of your ears; one agent shoots my shoulder. I wonder if you could take them down while you're on top of me, put them in a box somewhere. I tell you I am desert: my face cracks; reptiles hide in my shadows; my hair grows
because the wind pulls it. You push your face into my ear and I hear words in dust storms. I cough as you push your shoulder into my mouth. My eyes closed, I can feel the brush that grows along your arms reach for the sun.
You pull your face away and cry into my mouth. I can't drink all of you; tears spill down my neck and across my body. I flood until you are swallowed too; grated metal collapses into our streets; we pool around concrete tenements, land that never
holds a river quiet. We eat our border every hundred years then build it up again. We ask each other if we've carried any foreign items today, barbed wire fences stapled to our teeth, avocado pits in our back pocket. We say no.
BIBBED IN PAISLEY HE READS ZIZEK INSTEAD
of pulling September's steak tips from
a bag of peas in the freezer. On his lips
one hundred blue petals, dried flowers
from the bottom of a former lover's vase.
He licks his fingers, touches the hairs
of milled tree trunk in each page.
I wait; a flood runs from my mouth complete
with a rusted Honda Civic — the windows
all busted. My veins sprout to link my temples
to an electric socket. I black out and then
the most angelic resurgence of light ...
He tells me I have become
an example of Zizek — The unreal, we are
fascinated by the unreal. I reach for my back
molar, turn it to the right and braid
my hair. If I am unreal, I whisper, you must
be as real as my hair, which I will cut
with these scissors. You tell me: Cut it
short. I've always wanted to know if I could make
love to a boy I've always known was a woman.
DEAR ANGEL,
There are days when the world is filled with numbers and we are bad at math. We eat breakfast in f(x) = 2x and fuck in d(5) = 76f 86π. These are days you become sick of guessing the moon's surface area. I have no numbers, you say. I am named Angel in a sea of other Angels; how will you ever know to love me?
* * *
And I say, I'll call you the number 56; one day we'll learn to make love in differential equations. You say, I hate that number and I want to see objects in your face and see faces in the things you've left behind — I ask for such small pareidolia.
* * *
I don't speak English well and I don't speak Spanish well and now I am illiterate. I will learn this lamp as I have learned your face — in grooves, shape, and gradation. They will say I am not a poet and I will know all the ways they've been scarred by the ring of their voices. I will sing, I will sing, I will sing — turned dumb, I will sing you dry.
* * *
I tell you to meet me at the point of a Mercator triangle at 7:00 but can't find you. Our earth is made of triangles that never measure 180?. What mathematical proof to run my hands along the rocks and let them drink of me. What lie to divide land in lines that don't exist, to attempt to leave the body on a dark, studded night.
* * *
You will go to the desert and there will be gull. You will run to the sea and there will be woodpecker. You will track these birds in the degrees by which they scatter and you will curl your body microscopic and I will hold you because you have no other language with which to understand.
* * *
You whispered late at night into your pillow and I heard this: I hate letters as I hate numbers, as I hate nights you are gone. Come, memory, let me trace your eyes carefully. Let me learn you how.
SUNDAY MORNINGS
While Angel watches Antiques Roadshow
I plant a hazelnut in his ear and watch its brown orb
take root inside him. I push it into his fertile brain
until leaves poke out of his teeth and red-bellied
woodpeckers eat his squirming veins. They steal
the black in his hair and make nests, eat his lips
and eyes, worms that crawl along his face. I too,
want to swallow his insides, but his smell reminds me
of my grandmother's closet. I run inside him,
wrap myself in old furs, and pick up shards of glass
from frames we broke the night I said: I hate you.
Under a fox hat is a box; inside are Angel's teeth.
I pull at each small pearl, and put them in a glass
to grow in milk. As each tooth grows roots, I string them
into a necklace. Angel appraises my art at 100,000 dollars
and tells me it doesn't matter, we can't travel anyway,
we crossed a desert eating tunas, and got pricked
with no papers. He draws an X on my hand
because he wants to marry me, only I am a dollhouse
he built of cardboard and soap. How he shook his hair
all over my body to dust me with the roughest snow,
snow we've only seen on TV outside Antiques Roadshow,
caught in the hair of women carrying fake Tiffany lamps.
THE CORNER STORE CLERK SAYS HER NAME WAS OFELIA
and it started with a phone call. A man
asking for 50,000 dollars. Ofelia
dressed her children in plain cotton. She rushed
them from store to car; parking lots are how
people go missing. The tree in her front yard
swollen with winged ants — she couldn't sleep.
Fear: the tree was dying. She forgot
to paint its trunk white. She plugged her ears,
disconnected the phone and boarded
every window. She dreamt her body cut
in half — a perfect border. When Ofelia
found her son's body on the lawn, a display
of limbs, she thought the word: rooted. His blood
was sap the tree could not stop oozing.
AFTER I READ YOUR OBITUARY
you crawl into bed with my husband
and me. Your body is smaller
than I remember. I hush your voice
when you complain: The aloe vera
in the pot is made of plastic.
Your breathing grows, a weed
in monsoon — you whisper: Mother,
father, and sister fell open as birds
in their chairs when they were shot
at dinner. You show me how
you dove under the table, felt specks
of their blood on your lips before
seeing the scuffs on your father's leather
shoes. As you measure the depth
of my weatherproof windows,
you tell me you buried your family
in the walls of an abandoned
restaurant. With the tip of the plastic
succulent I rub your swollen ears.
I tell you: In this new country I am worse
than the city of thousands dead;
I am a wound red with iodine. My husband
wakes and I beg him for water
I've never known to taste so clean.
PHOTOS FOUND ON A DEAD MAN'S PHONE
Image one: poinsettias, their leaves
dark stains on a tablecloth.
Image two: shirt collar wet
with sweat and air freshener.
Image three: all dark and then —
Image four: head of hair pillowed
by a ball of newspaper.
Image five: a face planted
in text — black stain on finger.
Image six: negatives in an envelope.
Image seven: electrical outlets, walls white
with scars — vines that grew too feral.
Image eight: opaque faces, their smiles
generic as a bar of soap.
Image nine: too much light, bodies
pressed through glass then left to wash in acid.
Image ten: exposed tongue — the buds missing.
Image eleven: flash, then the phrase —
our darkest corner damp with memory.
Image twelve: white sheets, a face
burnt orange in the light.
BECAUSE THEY LACK COUNTRY
1.
He goes to desert bars and searches every stranger's pocket
for the plastic heart, the stork that made him. He kisses
bathroom stall handles and eats the ice in the urinal.
Not México, not Canada, not United States, or the coat
made in Honduras, but the cloth of open sky
is what he wants. He is hungry as a bare flagpole
on a windy day. The streets moan when border patrol
finds him. He says: Don't arrest me because I lack country.
Plastic wrist ties, serial number, toothbrush, shampoo
in a plastic bag: he is made of what is missing.
2.
She hitchhikes down the freeway in a dust storm and covers
her ears as cars honk past — qué mujer, they holler.
The place where land and road meet, her body collapses.
Skin lifts to the sun in sheets, such thirst is only found
in those that cannot ask for water. She carries herself
to an abandoned outhouse; by night, border patrol finds her
with infrared scanners. They point their guns and the smell
of urine fills the room. Filthy, one agent spits to the earth.
They take her body in a paddy wagon and drive for days.
It doesn't matter the country — this desert is all the same.
3.
In bed she asks him: Will you marry me? He thought
she asked: Can I give you country?
His teeth are stars, and the stars are teeth,
and there is nothing to mark the difference.
He draws lines across her body in pen — openings
for respiration. He draws lines in squiggles, dots,
and mapped curves. He draws cursive that says:
our we, our we. The whole room dyed
red, he whispers: Night vision goggles
will always stain us —
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Verging Cities by Natalie Scenters-Zapico. Copyright © 2015 Natalie Scenters-Zapico. Excerpted by permission of The Center for Literary Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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