Poetry:
Ana Garza G’z
Misplaced
I spent my morning searching
through drawers, boxes, and collapsed
travel bags for the postcards
where I drafted a poem
one afternoon. It just came,
easy as Compostela
at rest after a full meal.
I searched for it this morning,
the cards I’d folded and smoothed
In a hotel lounge, drinking
Coca Lite while picking ice
chips from a glazed china bowl.
Two waiters refilled the glass.
It was a poem about
Heat and the way the mind goes
When you stand in the plaza
Without a water bottle,
Without someone to tut-tut
when you say, “The sun has teeth,”
without anyone else but
your sister two feet away
silent as the dusty stones
you stand on, as walls,, as gate
posts and alleys and cramped-slits-
for-windows, without a soul,
just her silence since Madrid.
The day I wrote the poem
the hotel lounge was empty,
inanimate like the ice
pinging in my glass each time
I sipped. Then the waiters came
wordless as shadows to fill,
to fill, refill. After that,
I sat with the tile. The room
hissing like my breath. I toyed
with the Coca and the bowl,
in the lounge swallowing cold,
folding pasteboard squares, smoothing
them, counting their song, hisp-hisp,
for an hour, maybe more,
till I held smudged white paper,
blank as her shoulders, her back,
moving on ahead of me
in the heat for days—and days.
The postcards were just that kind
of cardboard, that doesn’t hold
up to folding and smoothing,
so they cracked, and the poem
fell out, all at once speaking
up, from my hands spilling out
in my voice, my words, spreading
over the table, the bowl,
the tiles, and the hotel lounge,
a spray of thoughts like the mist
from my drink, words with bodies
climbing out in crowds to say,
“It’s hot. The city is old.
Someone’s hands put these stones here
for us to stand on. No sun
light comes in,” like another
voice , a different one urging,
making the waiters come ask
and ask about my travels,
pressing close like the cobbles,
and I needed that today.
God, I needed it today.
Seeds
I liked palming maize from a barrel
in my aunt’s store. Squatting in the back
with the rice and the flour, I’d rest
my chin on the metal ring, inching
two fingers up the side and plunging
them deep in the movable chalk toward vastness
beyond the lip. my knees would buckle
then, my feet slide
back, my hands slip, searching
for a season, where the tickle of the leaf tip props
moon and sun, where the mutable
warmth of paste gives way to the kneading
hand, the breath of a fire
and the flatness and roundness of bread.
The Maya understood
the truth of who we are,
not clay, not wood, but supple,
pliant maize, so eager
for rain and wind
and light that Gods dulled
our eyes and ears to keep us
from reveling too
much, and seasons later
diminished in my aunt’s store, I--my hand
and my body--would float
inside that truth, glide
inside the remnants of my failing sight, drift
among the echoes of the soul’s
quotidian avarice, fingers in a barrel
of grain amid bodies hard,
bursting, rounded
at their bases, grooved
at their centers, wrinkled,
and tapered, all
clinging to my skin. I’d shriek
from the promise of so much, and the maize would splash
from the barrel to the floor near
the soles of my aunt’s cloth shoes,
where, so far from fertile earth and plows,
they paled and caught their breath,.
I would gasp, listening
for their bones to snap, waiting
for her feet to break
their bodies open into yellow dust, urging
my arms and hands forward, wanting
to hold them safe; to clutch
them, round and square as fingertips;
brush their faces;
and with my skin awakening
to braille, read
the miracle of corn.
BIO
Ana Garza G'z is a community interpreter and translator working in central California. Some of her work can be found online at The Able Muse, Leveler Poetry Journal, Rhythm Poetry Magazine, The Salt River Review, and Willows Wept Review.