There are things happening right now in many families, like my own, too painful to share.
So I will share this instead: My husband B spells iguana with an “E.”
I realized this once I realized how often our talk, for some reason, circles back to iguanas— sorry, eguanas— and whether or not they are poisonous or lethargic like Gila monsters— which B pronounces with a hard “G”— or if they look like Gila monsters. I’m not quite sure when lizards came up. Only that once my brother accidentally shot one when we were kids. Only that I still don’t know whose gun it was and what was the accident, when he was aiming straight for it. Only that my brother leaned over its quivering body, squeezing his own eyes open and shut and shaking his head, until it stopped moving. Only that then he made me stand up straight, at attention, to witness preparations as he cleaned up the blood, scotch-taped the wound and placed its broken body in a small, metal box where I collected my pennies. Two years later, in third grade, I had 48 cents to my name and told my abuelo I was rich; he responded by shaking my hand and telling me to spend it quick. But it was too late. My mother overheard me. With an open hand, she asked: how long have you been at this because I never gave you a cent.
Abuelo attended the lizard’s funeral. My brother recited Kaddish for the lizard. It was a hot afternoon on a weekday, like a Tuesday. My brother was not the son of the lizard, and remorse has no place in Kaddish. Or so I learned in Hebrew school when I told a teacher who replied that animals did not deserve Kaddish or funerals. My brother cried for the rest of the day. Abuelo said: that’s a lot of fuss for a beaded lizard. But it was a bright lime green and skinny, like the kind that still crawl up the walls of my parents’ home. Abuelo thought all lizards were poisonous and children could eat clams raw if they chased each half-dozen with a bit of whiskey. We never told my mother about that. My brother didn’t believe me when I told him, and then asked why I got to do everything. But he held a gun first and took a life without sharing why he did it. The number of lizards near my parents’ home seems to have doubled since my brother shot their predecessor, while my parents tell me they haven’t seen a scorpion in years. When I was young, scorpions were year-round and plentiful, blending right into the cheap brown carpet my mother always wanted torn out of our home. We wore indoor flip-flops. But still my mother managed to step on one, when she was in a rush to get to work and barefoot, and her whole lower leg swelled up and she had to go to the ER. She was furious that something so small could make her late for work. My mother has beat cancer three times. She’s taken enough drugs and endured so much radiation that she jokes she’s still radioactive. Full of isotopes. Now I say: it’s strengthened your natural venom. She laughs, flattered. When I say things like that, it sounds like she’s won something over me. She’s an eat-or-get-erased kind of apex predator, and I have that swimming beneath my bloodstream, lurking deep somewhere beneath my inability to go for throats. That night my father began tearing up the carpet and did not rest until it was all gone. He redid the floors himself. After forty years, he still calls her the love of his life with a lump in his throat. She says she loves this the most about him. That I’m like my father in this way is the one thing she’s still trying to change in me. Routinely people have misspelled her name, Esperanza. Like those credit card offers with high APR who inquire if she’d like to pay her hospital bills with the inviting Extravaganza Gomez wouldn’t you like 2% cash back.She will ask for your supervisor and get those white men to fix her roof properly, as they should have the first time. She will spell it out for you. She doesn’t stay still long enough for anyone to take a shot. Help the living, she says, Don’t grieve foolishly for the dead. I’m doing the best that I can for our family. I’m doing the best that I can.
And her talk, once it’s done, so she believes, never circles back.
Or so she believes.
Or so she believes.
Because these days, although I don’t tell her, it does.
I try to take her mind off of the things happening to us. The painful, unspeakable things. I tell her that I find lizards kind of charming; in fact, bearded dragons are quite princely. Say I didn’t know B and that I were a sort of reptile, like a turtle or crocodile, I’d leave my own species for a gecko or komodo dragon. I’ve discussed such decisions with my B. It has no effect on the fact he still thinks eguanas should be spelled with an e. Like my mother, he’s more concerned how I’ve held my palms open next to spiders larger than my hand and guided them to jump. I’ve been bitten by many things. I’ve stood long enough in open spaces, forgetting where I am, because someone who’s dead is speaking to me through two birds flying against the wind. I follow them. I chase an hour upon the tail of my B’s eguana, and he and I routinely board the same car of the same 7 train taking us from Manhattan back to Queens, although we are coming from different directions and multiple stops apart. He routinely finds me leaning against the doors, and sometimes I stumble onto people when they open.
Sometimes our chance meeting that keeps repeating is the only thing keeping me afloat in a given day.
Sometimes B asks if he were a turtle or crocodile, would that be enough for me. I tell him he’s the only eguana in the world, the only one for me who calls acid-wash “snow jeans—” as in that time he went back to our laundry room to look for my skintight, acid-wash jumpsuit that has since gone missing and asked the super if he’s seen my “snow jeans suit”— and I’d never in all my life chose any other human, horse, over my B, even some extra watery-big-eyed gecko with pleasant claws and dimples.
Geekos have dimples? He says.
Geckos, I almost correct him until I see what he’s doing.
Gila, he says, with his usual hard G. Eeguana.
Wow, you guys are weirdos, someone says on the train and turns up her music in a way that my B and I can see she is turning up her music. I tell my mother this. I tell her that sometimes I’d rather get bitten than protect my own hands and sometimes the Gs are hard and extravagant and they are the only things to hold onto, when everything seems like it’s up in the air and you just don’t know what’s going to happen to the people you love next.
My mother doesn’t respond to that. My husband is the only person in our family who is allowed to ask her questions that she otherwise won’t answer and the only one allowed to mishandle the rules of grammar in front of her. When he does these things, it’s charming.
So she doesn’t respond to what I’ve said. Instead she tells me the latest of a life she’s always trying to make normal through work. At a new place where’s temping as a translator for summer school, the teacher introduced my mother to the class as PS.
I’m sorry? My mother said to the woman. What did you say?
Your name, the teacher said. Don’t you go by initials of some sort, PS?
My mother smiled. No, I said you can call me “Espie” because you kept calling me Esparza.
My mother wrote her name Esperanza on the white board, and followed under it with: E-S-P-I-E.
The teacher nodded, attempting to take back the marker, but my mother wasn’t done yet. She then wrote S. P. and said to the teacher: You thought my name was this but— circled it, and then still wrote yet again on the board: P.S. She circled that and said: —you say you heard this. From Esperanza to P.S. How strange. That’s strange, isn’t it?
The teacher fluffed her blonde hair and smiled awkwardly as the kids laughed.
My mother said to the class in Spanish and then English: You are not to call me by my first name anyway. You are children.
What kind of class was it? I ask.
She says nothing at first. I have a feeling I know what it is. I know how much she loves what’s coming next.
Language Arts, my mother says gleefully. She’s an English teacher. You saw what she was trying to do, to my name. You wouldn’t believe the look on her face. You wouldn’t believe what she said next.
*
This summer, poetry has brought me much joy and relief in all those transcendent ways only verse can. I’ve been thinking a lot about community, and also about the times you need to step away and be with your family, whoever you choose them to be. It’s good way to come back, resurface, reengage with what work you are doing that keeps you afloat as well as the work that keeps you in dialogue with people you admire and respect. And so many good things have happened in the poetry world as of late that what follows below is only a snapshot of the wonderful news I’ve heard over the last few months. As always, keep reading: it’s the best way to grow as a poet. Sending all you horses (and eguanas) for your writing nights and days.—Rosebud Ben-Oni
Jihyun Yun has won the 2019 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry.
Joy Priest has won the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry from AWP.
Jade Cho has a new poem “竹升jook-sing” in Boaat.
Algoquin Books author Jaquira Díaz’s debut’s Ordinary Girls is a Fall 2019 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection!
Congrats to all the 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship Finalists: Noah Baldino, Franny Choi, Jane Huffman, Mia Kang, José Olivarez, Alan Pelaez Lopez, Julian Randall, Justin Phillip Reed, Monica Sok, Noah Warren and Michael Wasson.
Joy Harjo, a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation,is the new U.S. Poet Laureate; read her conversation with Navajo poet Sherwin Bitsui in BOMB. And here’s her poem “She Had Some Horses” over at The Poetry Foundation, “Perhaps the World Ends Here” at the Academy of American Poets, and “The Song of the House in the House” in The America Poetry Review.
C. T. Salazar has two sonnets in Tinderbox (read them here and here), and another in Foundry (read it here) under the series title of “American Cavewall Sonnet.”
Vincent Toro is now a Penguin Poet; Penguin Random House has acquired his second book “Tertulia,” which is forthcoming in June 2020. Check out his incredible debut, “Stereo. Island. Mosaic.,” Ahsahta Press’s2015 Sawtooth Poetry Prize winner, selected by Ed Roberson, andWinner of the 2017 Norma Farber Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, here.
Devon Figueroa has a new poem in Ploughshares, “Damp Room;” read it here.
Jennifer Maritza McCauley is featured in the Columbia Daily Tribune.
Jane Wong has a new essay in The Common, “Offerings,” on honoring the dead: “If you’re going to bring flowers for the dead, they better not be dead themselves. She also has an exhibit at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle “After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly” that runs until September 1st.
In The Los Angeles Review, Francisco Aragón has an essay “Portrait of the Poet As Critic (& Thinker)” on Rigoberto González’s book of criticism, Pivotal Voices, Era of Transition: Towards a 21st Century Poetics (University of Michigan Press, 2017). Francisco also has an essay “My Rubén” over at Crab Orchard Review, an excerpt from his forthcoming book, AFTER RUBÉN (Red Hen Press, 2020).
Lupe Mendez has a new book out, Why I Am Like Tequila, from Aquarius Press/Willow Books, and it has been selling out at all his events, so I suggest getting your copy stat.
And lastly, Ruben Quesada will serve at the Executive Director of Arte Américas,the largest Latinx-focused art center in Central California. I want to take a moment to add that Ruben has been a long-time champion of poetry in general and particularly Latinx poetry; he’s also the founder of AWP’s Latinx Writers Caucus, and was recently named as one of Chicago’s LIT50 by NewCity Lit. Ruben is a fantastic poet,and I know many of us can’t wait to see what his new creative pursuits will bring for the years to come.