On Being Seen
BIO
Veronica Silva is a Cuban-American poet who grew up in Miami, and currently lives in Orlando. She is a senior Creative Writing major at the University of Central Florida, where she specializes in poetry and serves as Editor-in-Chief of The Cypress Dome. Her work has previously appeared in PANK Magazine.
You can find her on Instagram @veronicalils
It’s lovebug season and somewhere
between your town and mine,
we stop at a gas station to fuel up and
scrape their guts off our windshields.
The dog is whining in my backseat, wondering why I’ve left him.
A pickup truck pulls up next to me and
the top half of the man’s body
is practically hanging out of his
rolled-down window: is that your
boyfriend?
You’re at the next pump, preoccupied
with your own bug-smudged glass,
and I say yes, confident it’s the right answer and he’ll drive away. But I
can still
feel his heavy gaze and the movement of
my breasts when I pump my arms
to wipe the glass. I want to turn away
from him but I remember the backs
of my thighs, my ass, the anatomy of prey, humans and our forward-facing eyes.
Most days I don’t know how to be the right kind of invisible.
You’re walking to me now and the dog is
growling, shiny wet teeth pressed
against the window. I could hush him, but then we’d
both be barking.
When he asks if I’m Spanish, I say hispanic and I know he shrugs because
he believes I’ve given him a synonym.
He shouts at you: and you’re american?
You respond we both are like it’s a challenge, and it surprises even me
because that doesn't always feel true.
(I’ll spend the rest of the drive studying
my own face in the rearview, wondering
if we have both become blind
to my otherness.) I roll the window
down for the dog and he finally releases
the pulled-back bow of his snarling lip and howls. His hound snout,
his elongated neck, his entire body
straightens like an arrow pointing, here
is the embarrassing ordeal of being a
girl in a tank top pumping gas,
the spectacle of
being maybe-american in america.
Inherited
I was your age when I married a
drunk
is
what my mother’s mother says to me when
there
are only women in the room. I become
an apparition of her at nineteen,
crooked teeth
glinting in the silver soup ladle / a mirror of me
floats
in the kitchen. I see my mother raising
her younger sisters as daughters,
crushing their lice
between her fingernails / scrubbing their scalps
clean in the bathroom / my grandmother raises her
husband from the dead after friends
leave his drunken
liver on the porch step. I watch the ceiling cave in
from the weight of my mother’s
guilt when she leaves
that house for good / I draw the
curtains shut
on the dust of collapse. I know all about fixing up
cracks
in the drywall. How does a girl decide
she is not responsible for giving her
mother
what her mother could not give herself? I am yet
to figure that one out—but I know that when
there are only women in the room, I
become
all
of them at once. When there are only women
in the room, sometimes, we don’t have to be women
at all. But right now, I watch—my
grandmother hide
the porcelain, the freshly-ironed linen, the TV set
under the bed. She leaves the baseball game playing
on the radio, serves his plate, and
when he passes
out at the table, his face in his dinner, she cleans him up,
washes the dishes, puts everything back in its place.