Praise for Rebecca Balcárcel's chapbook, Ferry Crossing:
“ . . . the opening poem is breathtaking -- as well as what follows.” -- Naomi Shihab Nye
Advance praise for Palabras in Each Fist:
“ . . . powerful emotional honesty . . . These poems are riveting and unforgettable, leaving the reader redeemed through the acceptance of self, radiant in the 'bright holiness of now.'” -- Larry Thomas, 2008 Texas Poet Laureate
Palabras in Each Fist
by Rebecca Balcárcel
Copyright 2013 Rebecca Balcárcel
Palabras in Each Fist by Rebecca Balcárcel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
You may copy, share, and even include this work in your own creations, provided that you give credit to the poet and do not earn money from the sale of her work. Please purchase additional copies if you use more than a class set of four poems. Ask permission for uses beyond these by contacting the author. Thank you!
Acknowledgments
The author expresses appreciation to the following magazines in which these poems first appeared:
North American Review: “Kitchen Clock” and “Guatemala”
Muse Squared: “Christmas Performance” and “Shoes”
Clockwatch Review: “Ferry Crossing”
New Texas: “For a Son” and “Ophelia”
South Dakota Review: “Crepe Myrtles”
Sacred Journey: “Watching Two-year-old Twins Eat Watermelon,”
Ilya’s Honey: “One Time, a Girl”
Kaleidoscope: “Tympanogram at Three Years”
5AM: “Teeth”
Amarillo Bay: “Visiting Tía”
Red River Review: “Against The Wall”
Handmaiden: “Questioning the Flood”
Langdon Review: “Ay, Yolanda!,” “Boy Picking Flower,” “Christening” and “Ave America”
3rd Muse: “Illiterate”
Descant: “Shoe-shopping”
Diner: “Interrupted While Reading”
Many thanks, too, to Trilobite Press for publishing the author’s chapbook, Ferry Crossing. A few poems from that chapbook also appear in Palabras in Each Fist.
Ongoing appreciation goes to Pecan Grove Press and its late editor, Palmer Hall, who published the print version of Palabras in Each Fist in 2010.
Palabras in Each Fist
“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.” —Richard Feynman
Contents
Part 1: Alfabeto/Alphabet
Part 2: Palabras/Words
Teacher's Guide
Reading Group Discussion Questions
About the Author
Poem List
Part 1: Alfabeto/Alphabet
Guatemala
Walking the Lake Path
Crepe Myrtles
Visiting Tía
Kitchen Clock
This is how I met Perla
Illiterate
Spinning My Planet
Ay, Yolanda!
Clean Break
Christening
Ave America
Christmas Performance
Mi Hija, You’ll Love This
Shoe Shopping
Gum
No Shoes
One Time, A Girl
The Namers
After the Accident
Birthday Present from Grandma
Against the Wall
Ophelia
Part 2: Palabras/Words
Hearing the Baby, 1:00am
Watching Two-Year-Old Twins Eat Watermelon
Interrupted While Reading
Spotless Teakettle
Tympanogram at Three Years
Communication Baseball
“Boy Picking Flower,” Colored by Five-Year-Old
May Snowstorm
This Kid
For A Son
Newton’s Laws of Family Motion
Teeth
Sweeping the Kitchen
Impasse
Pompeii on the Discovery Channel
Retreat
Is the self
Self-Forgiveness
Prayer By Kite
Questioning the Flood
Ferry Crossing
Part 1: Alfabeto/Alphabet
Guatemala
Guatemala was a place inside my closet. It was a crumpled tissue- paper flower six inches across. Guatemala was a stack of workbooks that read “Un pájaro. Dos gatos . . .” bought too late or worked too fast so that none of those dancing syllables would pair up in my head. Guatemala was wire hangers wearing ruts in the shoulders of vestidos, dresses inappropriate for all occasions in northwest Iowa, each skirt zig-zagged with pink guacamayas, crazy green quetzales shouting at me from each short sleeve. Teasing me, my navy blues and forests. Catcalling, like the blacktopped boys hanging out against the Dairy Queen, boys with butterscotch skin shouting roller coaster words, looping their exotic syllables up a scale, flicking cartwheel sounds, leaving me excited and sick, amazed to be noticed and wanting to hide. Which I could almost do in my turtleneck and walking shorts, my knee socks and penny loafers, if only I didn't show my eyes which were obviously chocolate, obviously giddy , frightened, certainly curious and filling fast with wonder at what I might let myself be—and do—with a disreputable hispano boy. I looked straight ahead. Kept walking. And these Dairy Queen boys I stuffed to the back of my closet, with the crumpled flower, the taunting dresses, with the workbooks of the lilting language of my father's country, Guatemala.
*
Walking the Lake Path
I walk the dirt path with Abuelita.
Lake Atitlán laps no-yes-yes
against the bank.
My mind spins in Texan,
a Ford motor in fourth;
hers is quetzal wings
beating, footfalls of panther at top speed.
This morning she chuckled stories.“Imagina!”
A translator stitched her syllables
into the jail cell wedding, the tale
of hidden chicken nests,
a girl's pirated eggs.
Her mouth and mine know “no,”
but each eye shines yes
and yes. Silence weaves
its white cloth between us.
At a shaded place, I hold
one unfinished edge,
she the other.
*
Crepe Myrtles
Those in full sun
have cracked open
their round cases and flounced out
their ruffles, hot pink vestidos.
They sway under el sol
whole bunches! and unfurl their fiesta frills
from June to September.
We watch their salsas, their boleros,
their cha chas. Mira! my aunt shouts
every time we pass. And every time we pass,
they bob and curtsey, they twirl
their sizzling fringe.
This was my introduction to passion:
flowers, the way they explode
into curls of crepe, and my aunt,
the way she soul-sings the old canciones,
right through drought, through these long,
tangled days after the accident,
sometimes through clenched teeth.
This is what I knew of spirit,
espíritu, that molten stream,
before I ever wrote a poem,
before it turned me inside-out,
like the blossoms.
*
Visiting Tía
Where I come from,
groups of furniture are suites,
every outfit has its own set
of shoes, but at the house of my tía,
we wipe our hands on mismatched
dish-towels, flatten balls of harina into tortillas.
All morning, I am part of
he warm kitchen, bubbling frijoles,
hot gorditas in lidded baskets.
I become the “q” in Bequi, my nickname,
learning the art of tomato-seasoned rice.
I wear Tía's apron; the cousins braid my hair.
I almost fit
My halting steps in the new language
relax to a saunter. When I trip
over verb endings, Tía picks me up.
Uncles and cousins ramble in for lunch.
We crowd ten around a table for six—
lap children, folding chairs.
And after marimbas, it's Pedro Infante
rolling out songs I might learn how to dance to.
*
Kitchen Clock
A fork pitches each stabbed minute
over its shoulder; the hour hand
scrapes its knife blade
around a sixty-minute plate.
Each second is a water drop
pinging a stainless steel sink.
She hears that ping punctuate
the morning's instructions, counterpoint
the clicking of silverware at dinner.
Each second is pennies, ping,
in a coffee can, savings to send south
across three borders by King Express.
Each ping is a prayer
murmured over a roasting hen,
a plea for the son who pitches
accent over his shoulder, struts
to the school bus, scraps marimba records
for CD's, shiny as blades.
And while she gives employer's girl
sixty-minute plaits, three-thousand six hundred
pings have slid down her throat to
her stomach, where muscles tighten
around pricking tines
every time she checks the kitchen clock.
*
This is how I met Perla,
also standing at the edge of the room, also keeping eyes and ears open, mouth shut, also seeking the shadows among the crowd and noise of a cousin's Quincañera. After tasting how my presence would season the silence, she spoke. “Mi esposo,” nodding towards a man standing up at a table, laughing too loudly, setting his empty glass, wobbling, among several others. Spanish class had given me a few words. When she said this, “My husband,” I understood. To ask her age, I held up my fingers, flashing all ten, then nine. She flashed back ten and eight; we giggled. Then she began talking, as if I could understand, as if her earnestness could ferry meaning. She began in a hushed tone. “Baby.” Then shaking her head, loosed a long chain of sounds, to my ears like Legos pouring onto tile or Lite-Brite pegs falling into a cannister. She bit her lip, grabbed my forearms, finally crossed herself, and repeated a word I recognized: “nada.” Placing her hand on her abdomen, she again said, “Nothing.” She had spoken to me, la Americana, the one who would enter a university in the fall, the one who could reply only with silent understanding, the one who would not spread rumors after mass. She gripped my hand, looked at me with eyes the color of fertile soil.
*
Illiterate
Every morning he buys a paper
and turns to page three over coffee.
He scans the sea before him.
His son is learning i and he finds one.
He steps on i's across two columns.
He finds capital I and walks the shape
in his mind: a street with two dead ends,
the short alley between birth point and death,
a bar propping apart two unknowns
that would otherwise spring shut.
*
Spinning My Planet
“No problem. Plate of cake,” he says,
the idiom free throw bouncing off the rim.
I'm still searching for “piece”
when the foreign student presents me with the ball,
carried in brown hands from the other side
of cedar plank fence.
His jaunt walk stops the Hi at my lips.
His smile, a three-point swish,
falls into my eyes as I place one tan hand
across Spalding, one below NBA.
For a moment four hands hold the Earth still.
Coffees next to creams.
Again I am behind, pronouncing Thank . . .
as he steps backwards, waves.
My breath stalls on his gingersnap eyes,
the cut of his jaw, as he turns, Oh, why
am I not wearing something pretty?
spinning my planet, Why did I cut my hair?
as he steps lightly Gotta lose this baseball cap
back to his side of the world.
*
Ay, Yolanda!
You spun a plate on each index finger, carried English in one teacup ear, tucked a branch of Spanish bougainvillea behind the other; you double-dutch jumped the old and new countries like skipping ropes, your pigtails swinging North, South, feet landing on each side of the sidewalk crack without a miss-pronunciation.
You threw tortilla in the first toaster slot, Pop-tart in the second; right-handed the pencil at Central Junior High, left-handed the skillet en la casa; you wept at Univisíon telenovelas, laughed at CBS sit-coms, flung puns in both languages, juggled two O's on your tongue: the Latin o, the Anglo oh.
Ay, my cousin! I studied you through the single lens of my Cloroxed context, caught palabras—your Spanish syllables—in each fist. You walked, tough act, baby sister on each hip, and I follow, my eyes on your black, maize-silk hair, parted down the middle.
*
Clean Break
Looking up from a sink of suds, hot water,
and a freshly scraped plate,
I'm All-American, wedged into a suburb—
formica backsplash, factory-spat switch plate,
Pfizer faucet gashed with electric light.
I'm white.
But looking down, I see brown
arms, brown hands dipping into bubbles
a chip on the plate's rim, and I could be
Abuela, my grandmother,
washing in a basin of river water,
her dishrag rubbing swift circles,
her laughter clattering over patio tiles.
Back against warm adobe, I, Abuelita,
could tell stories— a son's corncob cars
brought to Mass, a daughter's stick doll
swinging cornsilk skirts, and the priest
bursting into the jail cell where I
held the hand of the boy I ran off with,
where our parents gathered outside the bars
where the priest married us en punto,
on the spot.
I unfurl tales in ribbons of Español, and even
my grand-daughter, la Americana,
curls one around each finger.
Her blood remembers our sashays of phrase.
Her hands, twins to mine, plump the soft vowels.
She joins the giggling, the knowing nods.
Without effort she swims in idiom,
turns each conjugation, inhales punchlines.
She takes her place at our table,
savors our ways, our histories,
our multi-syllabic nouns.
*
Christening
My father's name should have been
Sinforoso, according to the leather-bound book
that ascribes to each day a saint,
to each day its own light, making the calendar
a wheel of candles.
The seventh son of Sinforoso was Federico,
a name my grandmother jingled on her tongue,
shortened to sweet Lico. So
the wide-faced boy grew up Lico,
seven spaces removed from
the full
sun of Sinforoso.
Rosalina was to be Thomasa, a name
her grandmother actually called her,
as this was proper, and because “Rosalina”
was chosen without even a gesture
toward the leather-bound book, and only
for the ringing and fall of the syllables.
So this little one grew up with her back
to the stone church wall.
When these two married and named
their babies, the candle-wheel broken,
each day was only its number.
The leather-bound book:
lost, its letters scrambled.
So Rebecca, Juan Carlos, and Antonio
grew up searching for wheels
of leather and candle books,
with their faces toward wired lights
their backs against sheet-rock.
*
Ave America
—for Dad
Plenty of corn, no tortillas:
Iowa 1968, and only her eyes—
my Peace Corps girl—
speak my flamenco, my Latino
hers the only heat slicing
through snowstorm, starestorm,
blue eyes and blond hair storm and, hombre,
it's November and zero degrees
when I walk off the plane into marriage, into the GED.
I swing a night-school-English machete
until I'm a Bachelor of Arts cum laude,
and why not Husband, I'm thinking,
why not Lover, Novio, French Kisser,
why not Tender Toucher of Arts,
why not Heartbeat, Drumbeat, Got-the-beat
Man or Woman, certified.
Plenty of corn; at last tortillas:
flat as social security cards,
circular as compass on-the-dough,
no woman's hand, no grandma's pan,
fat packages side-by-side, airtight with twist-tie
cornmeal abacus in the deep freeze.
My mother writes, what is America?
is dancing the alarm-clocked sunrise,
dancing fútbol turned soccer dancing taco
turned Bell. I ballroom to classroom,
teach the Tango, the lingo, the trying-hard gringo.
School-teacher trot, chase-the-mortgage cha cha,
dance for mí familia, dance for my life.
*
Christmas Performance
In front of the altar rail, I sang
“La Noche Buena” with Father.
I laid out Spanish syllables by rote,
setting empty freight cars on the line
of melody, my Anglo upbringing obscured
by the swing of my straight black hair.
Mom savored “Felíz Navidad” from the front pew,
the words exotic caramels unwrapped for her
by two years in Peace Corps, Guatemala.
Father strummed the guitar
brought from his homeland on a 727,
diving without accent into liquid lyrics.
He cheered the room with his red woven shirt
trimmed in ribbons and gold foil thread.
I wore a dress I hated— a hot pink spill
fringed with orange animals. On the second row,
a boy from school stuck out his tongue.
My mouth opened at the right times,
pronounced lullaby vowels, rocked farmers' wives
into holiday warmth. “How lovely,” they
murmured afterwards, seeing a Cassatt painting:
“Latin Girl Sings With Father.”