Angela Narciso Torres

Confessions of a Transplant

My first year living in America
the scent of frying garlic
sent me weeping. My eyes
 
swept the somber avenues
starving for color. I devoured
the aquamarine of broken glass,
 
a wire festooned with yellow shoes,
the sudden shower of rose
on a sidewalk. The memory
 
of sour mangoes made rivers
in my mouth. At the market I picked
the greenest nectarines, dredged them
 
in salt that stung my chapped lips.
Words I hoarded like rock
candy, melted on my tongue
 
like my too-hard r’s. Range rover, red
robin, river rock. I practiced
into the ear of an empty flagon,
 
reciting litanies to the saint
of lost things. The walls echoed
with whispers. Lying lily-still
 
in the goblet of night, I drank
the sweet croon of nameless birds.
Lullabies bloomed like moonflowers.

---

Self-Portrait as Water

 
why does the body feel
   most beautiful underwater—    
is what goes through me
 
   when I break the blue
surface, levels rising as I plumb
   the tub’s white womb
 
this second skin thinner,
   slicker, gleaming wet
as a lacquered bowl
 
   because the simplest
of molecules—two H’s
   one O—love
 
to love each other, cling
   to what they touch
how this universal solvent
 
   swallows every hill
fills the hollows
   of my surrender
 
most forgiving of
   substances, I resolve
to live like you—to fill
 
   and be filled,
to take the shape
   of my vessel
 
dispensing heat
   displacing matter
lighter than air

---

Recuerdo a mi madre

I remember brown-outs. How soft
candle wax felt against my scar.
How it formed a pebbled lakebed.

Decades ago we spread blankets
on our parents’ bedroom floor. I fell asleep
watching my beautiful mother sleep.
 
Cloaked in her frayed bathrobe, her guava
scent, I clutched my fears like lost teeth
then let them slip down the drain.
 
*
 
I’ve been avoiding the telephone,
spending dusty hours at the piano.
 
Broken chords. I stutter the cadenza.
Prolong the fermata. Each note
 
insists like the past.
Like prayer and dirge.
 
*
 
Today I let light have its way. Lavender
candles ribbon the air with scent.
 
Sun presses into a window. Into silence
a jackhammer drills. I close my eyes
 
and see a trembling star. How long till
the full moon blues the sidewalks?
 
*
 
Finding my mother
crouched on the tiled floor,
 
her flickering eyes swollen,
the housedress she loved
 
in shreds, my father led us
outside. Called an ambulance.
 
Her silence an explosive
he’d learned to detonate.
 
*
 
My sister lights a trail
of ants with a match.
 
Some pop, others scurry
from a dead finch. A few linger,
 
stitching a loose border
around the bird’s stone eye.
 
I couldn’t look, couldn’t
stop looking.
 
*
 
Bewildered, I grew up,
learned to embroider
 
an alphabet. I dipped my pen
in father’s tears. To know
 
my mother requires
the patience of a miner
 
carving amethyst from rock.
To know my mother
 
is to memorize
a labyrinth of longing.




--
Angela Narciso Torres’s poetry collection, Blood Orange, won the Willow Books Award. Recent work appears in Nimrod, Water~Stone Reivew, Spoon River Poetry Review, Colorado Review, and other journals. A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program and Harvard Graduate School of Education, she has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Illinois Arts Council, and Ragdale Foundation. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she is a poetry editor for RHINO and a reader for New England Review.