Falling in Love
* * *
with Fellow Prisoners
POEMS
Gwendolyn Zepeda
with Preface by Lucha Corpi
Falling in Love with Fellow Prisoners: Poems is made possible through a grant from the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance.
Recovering the past, creating the future
Arte Público Press
University of Houston
4902 Gulf Fwy, Rm 100
Houston, Texas 77204-2004
Cover photo by Jackson Myers
Cover design by Ashley Hess
Zepeda, Gwendolyn.
[Poems. Selections]
Falling in love with fellow prisoners : poems / by Gwendolyn
Zepeda.
p.; cm.
ISBN 978-1-55885-769-8 (alk. paper)
I. Title.
PS3626.E46A6 2013
811'.6—dc23
2013021733
CIP
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
© 2013 Gwendolyn Zepeda
Printed in the United States of America
13 14 15 16 17 18 19 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface by Lucha Corpi
Raised Catholic
A Locust a Hundred Feet Up
Paranoid
The Mexican in Me / The White in Me
Tempt
Prayer to a Man
Elders
These People
I Had a Job I Hated
A Man Needs a Woman
I Ruined My Work Shirt with Jack in the Box Taco Sauce
Strongly Felt Sensations of This Morning
The Elevator’s Tight Squeeze
Like a Baby Doll
The Homeowner
In the Parking Garage
A Bad Feeling
Eula in the Bathroom Stall
9-to-5, After Noon
His Son Is His Everything
Falling in Love with Fellow Prisoners
Words for Nerds
Unrequited
Zombie Maker
Blondes, More Fun
Be Witch
The Flower for December Is Narcissus
Fishing
Freckles
This may be your favorite song, but
(The Suess Carried Over)
Our Love Is Like a Bomb Shelter, Baby
He dialed me by accident and I eavesdropped
Ain’t I a Woman
Hush Now
Girlfriend
Embarrassing to Admit
Situational Anemia
Nicked Spine
Child
Self-Acceptance
Malady, Adjusted
Proposal
Omega Wolf
Strongly Felt Sensations
That Music Made Me Cry
At the Animal Shelter, Was a Volunteer
After Hours of Girls Gone Wild
Curtainless Bohemian Girl
Sunflower
Why There Are So Many Songs About DJs
Winter
This Girl I Know
Springtime Is an Indomitable Monster
Diner Trick
Live Band
Traveling
Drive Through
A Link
You Are Missed, Mr. Rogers
Vietnamese Noodle House
Preface
Many years ago, a friend who loved talking on the phone called me. She was contemplating penning a collection of personal stories. After recounting in detail how her day had been, she asked: “How would you know you’re a writer? How can anyone tell?” I answered her query with one of my own: “When you feel the urgency to express a strong emotion, or you’re so bored with routine you can’t stand it anymore, do you reach for pen and, paper or the phone?” Silence, then a click at the other end, and I knew our conversation—and possibly our friendship—was over.
My response must have given my friend something to consider. Perhaps it also helped her to harness the will to respond to the urgency not by talking but by sitting down often enough to get the writing done. A few years later her memoir saw the light of day.
I was reminded of that conversation as I listened to award-winning fiction writer, children’s book author and poet, Gwendolyn Zepeda, in conversation with radio host Eric Ladau in April 2013. Zepeda spoke candidly about her life as a trailer park mother, whose way of staving off boredom was watching TV or surfing the Internet. Soon, she joined a group of bloggers who exchanged online comments on TV programs. She became a popular blogger, which led to her landing a paying job as one. In fact, she became the first professional Latina online blogger.
In April 2013, Zepeda was named Houston’s Poet Laureate. She is not only the first city laureate, but also the first Latina to receive that well-deserved recognition for her work. When Ladau asked about the things that inspire her to write poems, Zepeda replied, “Usually, they are about anything that evokes strong emotions in me. Something will make me feel angry, nostalgic, joyful or sad, and I will quickly write a poem on my smart phone. I used to carry a note pad, but now it’s much easier to use my phone.”
Zepeda added that walking across a parking lot that day, she had seen a baby wearing a pair of skinny jeans. She reached for her smart phone and wrote a couple of lines about the stylish infant.
I was delighted with her comments. I will probably not own a smart phone or an electronic pad soon, but I have always carried a small notebook and a pencil tucked in a pocket of my handbag. In every room in my house, there is notepad and pencil handy at all times. Although I gave up the idea for safety reasons, long ago I also had a small recorder taped to the dashboard of my parrot-green VW bug to use during long road trips.
For the poet, the task of writing down a line or an entire poem as it occurs is not only wise, it is vital. Whether the poem is lyrical or narrative, love or epic, philosophical or imagistic, with consonant or assonant rhyme, structured as a sonnet, ode, elegy, haiku or blank verse, one thing is certain: the poet must be receptive to the poem the moment it comes. Poetry is elusive. It requires that we acknowledge the many disparate elements that come together to form the poem and record them by any means at hand when they occur to us.
Many times, the lines of a poem appear suddenly, fast and furious, like a meteor shower. Just as quickly they burn and dissolve in the poet’s subconscious. If the poet captures them as they begin their luminous trek, they become the seeds that fall into imagination’s fertile ground and take root. Then the poet nips, waters and shapes it until the poem has nothing more or less than all essentials for its survival. What happens to the poem after it becomes a separate and complete entity is a matter of deliberate choice for the poet.
Naturally, we are inclined yet afraid to show our work to perfect strangers, who may not appreciate it. I have been approached by younger poets, who are seeking publication of their first poetry collection and want my advice. I don’t discourage them from sending it out to various publishers. But I always point out that making one’s work “public,” and becoming a respected poet begins long before one publishes an entire book of poetry. Poetry is meant to be heard as much as read on the page. The best way to get one’s poetry known is to read it to an audience as often as possible. Among the listeners, there might be magazine or periodical editors, or a publisher, who might develop an interest and ask the poet for a submission. Nowadays, social media provide good opportunities for poets to have their work circulate widely.
Gwendolyn
Zepeda has been writing poetry since she was a child. Publication of her first major poetry collection comes as the culmination of many years of writing poetry, of making her poems known to a variety of audiences and readerships at public readings, in periodicals and magazines, online publications and several chapbooks.
Zepeda’s collection title, Falling in Love with Fellow Prisoners, hooked and reeled me in immediately. The mere phrase “falling in love” evokes a violent, uncontrollable drop down to a place from which escape may be nearly impossible. In fact, love is often described as a tender or sweet trap. Falling in love is diving into the well of unfulfilled desire, where satisfaction and joy in love as in life are hard to realize. The experienced lovers, “the fellow prisoners,” know all this and hope for the best, or plot imaginary escapes. The younger lovers suspect or sense the danger involved, but intrigued by love’s promise of pleasure, they are willing to risk the pain and take the plunge. Zepeda writes:
The inward face
that holds itself blank
is begging to suffer in love. (29)
Zepeda’s poetic voice is unsentimental, essential and definitely urban. Her unerring vision scans the urban landscape and discovers the many prisons along the way: a “bomb shelter” where two lovers wait for a nuclear holocaust; the store window, where a “Baby Doll” sits “poised, bored tease in / a building that gleams”; a bathroom stall where Eula, a delusional spirit, endlessly retells her story; the American Dream home; a car, speeding down an open road to a fortress, the workplace.
With polished, precise and direct lines, the poet’s eye bores through the drab, concrete walls of the workplace to expose the stark, monotonous reality behind them.
The walls are beige, the carpet’s dark beige, all the metal and / fake wood are beige and brown. The prints on the walls / are beige. And brown. And taupe. And gray. And gray-ish, brownish purple. (21)
In this prison, inmates have jobs to do, but “no one cares” what they do or if they do it “well” or “cheerfully … or with any feeling / whatsoever, or not.” People trapped inside it endure the monotony of days in quiet desperation, when “boredom” is “almost as bad as loneliness” (21). All anyone wants is:
to see the
sun glint and feel
the swim motion forward. (35)
Or create an imagined escape, as watching through a window,
A medium-sized Black Bird flies over the grass and the fountains. / To the vine-y-webbed bayou that’s right there for both of us— / for him and for me—to be wild in. (16)
But when finally someone escapes and gets home, she is “too tired to do a god- / damned thing.” And all she has left is her imagination, her dreams:
… All drama, all violence, all sexy, fast
fast fast and so very interesting, all night long. (21)
At home or at work, hope is a caged animal, like the kitten or cat at an animal shelter, waiting for someone to take him home, or the mynah bird outside a dry cleaners, “Shiny and black with his face / orange and gold,” who mimics a passer’s-by “I love you” (75). But it is also a full term fetus at the moment of birth, and a mother’s first dream wish for him or her:
we cut the strings, and fully formed,
you float away. I shade my eyes and
watch. I wish you ever higher. (49)
The imprisoned human heart, the spirit, longs for freedom. But escape from prison, even when possible, demands constant effort, daily payments in sweat and blood, with the balance due paid in tears. Every day, Zepeda tenders a poem for that freedom.
It is my hope that the fashionable infant in skinny jeans will find the work where she belongs, so I may enjoy reading the poem, as I have enjoyed reading the poems in Falling in Love with Fellow Prisoners. Enhorabuena, Gwendolyn Zepeda. Encore!
Oakland, California
July 2013
For Dat, with love
Raised Catholic
A Locust a Hundred Feet Up
Is watching me through his
monster eye
head like a gar holding
fairy wings
He wants to fly into
my hair
He wants to fly into
my head
and skitter it with
chitinous things
He wants to lay the
farmers bare
He wants to eat
’til Armageddon
Sent by God to teach a
lesson
Remind me of my
sin
skittering under skin
I shiver under ugly eyes
And then he flies
away
Paranoid
The paper skin lady with faint gray whiskers
who simmered rice pudding did say
that I should have had my tail removed upon Baptismal Day.
I felt the bump far down my back, did not know what to say.
I dreamed the Devil made a mark on my banana bread.
when I was thin, the men all ’round would call me pig instead.
Now that I’m fat and strangers grind against me, nothing’s said.
Roaches used to crawl above my head upon the wall.
I knew that God had sent them, messengers winged and small.
His wish to see me dead required no reasoning at all.
When the woman on the news said Satan often told her things
I smiled to find another who might know my hidden parts.
I never told my therapist about these secret dreams.
She thought that I was good. I didn’t want to break her heart.
The Mexican in Me
makes me superstitious. Makes me respect my elders for fear that, otherwise, my grandmother will fly down from heaven to slap my face. Makes me talk really loud when I’m excited or mad. Makes me get mad whenever I feel like it, like it’s a perfectly healthy thing. Makes my butt big. Makes my lips big. Makes my eyes big. Makes me pale green in certain lights. Makes me want to wear shiny, pretty things. Makes me love babies and animals. Keeps me from getting my ass kicked. Makes me mean, but only because I love you. Puts moles on my skin.
(Makes me diabetic, some day soon, maybe. That’s what put my grandma in heaven, along with other things.)
It makes you accuse me of using this half to get by, which I’ll ignore.
It makes me a little bit magic.
The White in Me
makes me love elves and dwarves. Makes me want to hang cross-stitched samplers in my house, with letters and glyphs that mean things. Makes me have a 401(k). Makes it okay for me to wear nothing shiny, sometimes. Lets me think I’m so smart at school, even while I might be stupid at home. Makes the cops listen to my side of the story. Makes you trust me at garage sales. Gives me stretch marks and makes me burn in the sun. Makes me sweet to strangers, even when I want to hate them.
It makes you accuse me of using this half to get by, which I’ll ignore.
And that makes me a little bit magic.
Tempt
There is a demon-eyed girl.
God, don’t let me wish that
I could eat her
could feel her shiny sin inside.
I wish I was a bat-winged
girl in hell, sometimes, so I
could more appropriately
enjoy this.
Prayer to a Man
God is our father and I’m Daddy’s girl
but all I’ve got the guts to want
is getting through the day
Heavenly Father, Heavenly King
I bypass the mother
what does she know
she’s good for flowers, she’s good for foot pain
I don’t pray to some woman in aluminum foil halos
saw her reflection in a rose-crusted clock
ninety-nine cent store
butterfly-slopping blanket on the wall
laminated holographic
prayer card
milked by The Son, hey, lady, get a job
I don’t see your name in no Big Three.
Our Father who art in Heaven
should I sit on your lap
laugh at your jokes
whisper in your ear “job, house, clothes”
probably let you kiss my cheek
and giggle “your whiskers tickle!”
Now can I get my presents and go?
Father of men, holy be Thy name
Maker of the world-goes-round
Do I have to swallow my pride or what?
Do you want me down on my knees?
Do you want my face wet, am I pretty in pain,
should I moan out the words “oh God, oh my God …
can I please just get through your world tonight safe
to my tired and groveling home?”
It’s pretty You-damned sad getting to the point
where I say: Let’s strike a deal.
Just keep my kids safe
I don’t care about myself
an eye, tooth or nail, take whatever you want
keep them safe from the ones that you made in your
image, please
handsome god
heavenly father
holy king
righteous warrior
shining quarterback
sacred cowboy
special man
Elders
And what are you?
You’re jealousy.
You’re hate, old lady.
Hatred.
Old man, you’re bitterness
personified.
When your kind dies
this world will be
rinsed clean
except for your seeds.
These People
On the news there’s people in the Valley getting
arrested for leaving their children in hot, locked cars.
It was a hundred and three yesterday. Grandpa walked
through Wal-Mart unhindered. The kids were okay.
They were hardy.
In my life there’s people I know who only criticize