Carmen Giménez Smith

Once when I was harmless and didn’t know any better, a mirror to the front of me and an ocean behind, I lay wedged in the middle of daylight, paper-doll thin, dreaming, then I vanished. I gave the day a fingerprint, then forgot. I sat naked on a towel on a hot June Monday. The sun etched the inside of my eyelids, while a boy dozed at my side. The smell of all oceans was around us— steamy salt, shell, and sweat, but I reached for the distant one. A tide rose while I slept, and soon I was alone. Try being a figure in memory. It’s hollow there. For truth’s sake, I’ll say she was on a beach and her eyes were closed. She was bare in the sand, long, and the hour took her bit by bit.

¿Sólo una sombra?/Only a Shadow (Ester IV)?, from the series Santos y sombras/Saints and Shadows, 1993–1994, by Muriel Hasbun My daughter gathers the seeds she finds in our desert, calls them spirits —the spirits are us, she says when I worry those orbs in my fingers to conjure her birth. The wind’s first thought is to craft those seeds: vessels when the tree worries 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 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 was the pulse I toss into the wind with the seeds. Particles of us pass over like whispers from the cosmos, the clatter the wind makes. I worry birds will take her into themselves, that she’ll become a fleck of their transience, but this is how we furrow ourselves into the cosmos, the twine of our breaths into wind, into carbon, into the tree’s colossal fingers reaching back from under the earth.

Off-season and in the burnt forest of my nightgown, a feral undergrowth that marks me as burial site— to be still enough or just enough. My arms become fat arms: hearth. I eat dirt for doubt, a secret bleached old as lie. I out-want like a spindly winged monster. If I were a bug— were I—then you'd hope for reparation, and paint more brown into the plot.

It happened to me once. Winter came, and snow quilted every inch. I stood on the soapbox, as I was told, and made staggering accusations. The public ignored, so I retreated behind the potted yew. I was waiting for a moment I was supposed to have on a balcony overlooking the giant, gridded landscape. The sounds I made underscored what I meant. The potted yew was the face that I wore. It was a metaphor for what could be. The public endured. I put the potted yew behind me. I made staggering an art. That wasn’t the truth though. Winter comes and negates all it covers. It doesn’t matter where I stand. The balcony is a floor without walls. The yew is a hurt that shadows. The instance lives beneath us. Not just us, everybody. The shadow hurts us. I make sounds like the truth. Fate and theft are involved. I think I told you this before. The floor is a wall that obscures. The yew is quilt without color. Shadow is a fate you involved. The yew on a balcony negates. I told you this before. I was left undone. It’s what I meant. Underneath everyone.

Decoy Gang War Victim, 1974, by Asco (photographer: Harry Gamboa, Jr.) For Harry Gamboa,   Jr. Just a tick ago, the actor was a Roman candle shot to the sky, smudged by rain’s helter- skelter. His motivation was: he’s a stooge on L.A.’s sodden turnpike, so we have “to make” art. Got to rezone and react. The world the bare wall to his bullet. Got to rile up the populace, to fortify the arsenal. Once in a while, repopulate and penetrate, paint a list of incitement onto the walls. An elder told him that to overturn the city, one must surrender body/belongings to the one explosive spectacle of truth, making it ongoing. Pay attention. To overturn the city, not just the scraps but fervor itself. Not just the wan broadcast of indignation but IRL incursions into the workhouses and poorhouses to inflame the thousand points of  light. A lean surge, departure pinks both ends of  him. He’s the n th layer folded into the stand’s nerve.

We said she was a negative image of me because of her lightness. She's light and also passage, the glory in my cortex. Daughter, where did you get all that goddess? Her eyes are Neruda's two dark pools at twilight. Sometimes she's a stranger in my home because I hadn't imagined her. Who will her daughter be? She and I are the gradual ebb of my mother's darkness. I unfurl the ribbon of her life, and it's a smooth long hallway, doors flung open. Her surface is a deflection is why. Harm on her, harm on us all. Inside her, my grit and timbre, my reckless.

My heart is bleeding. It bleeds upward and fills my mouth up with salt. It bleeds because of a city in ruins, the chair still warm from sister's body, because it will all be irreproducible. My heart bleeds because of baby bear not finding mama bear and it bleeds to the tips of my fingers like I painted my nails Crimson. Sometimes my heart bleeds so much I am a raisin. It bleeds until I am a quivering ragged clot, bleeds at the ending with the heroine and her sunken cancer eyes, at the ending with the plaintive flute over smoke-choked killing fields. I'm bleeding a river of blood right now and it's wearing a culvert in me for the blood. My heart rises up in me, becomes the cork of me and I choke on it. I am bleeding for you and for me and for the tiny babies and the IED-blown leg. It bleeds because I'm made that way, all filled up with blood, my sloppy heart a sponge filled with blood to squeeze onto any circumstance. Because it is mine, it will always bleed. My heart bled today. It bled onto the streets and the steps of city hall. It bled in the pizza parlor with the useless jukebox. I've got so much blood to give inside and outside of any milieu. Even for a bad zoning decision, I'll bleed so much you'll be bleeding, all of us bleeding in and out like it's breathing, or kissing, and because it is righteous and terrible and red.