Roy G. Guzmán

Blood Fantasia

   a loose cento-sestina

I am cosmically outrageous,    a tragic orchestra.   Mother dressed him in guava-
     colored lace crinolines     and the silence of the orchid.   His head, a smashed
piñata of bone and blood,      a country with 180,000 orphans,  the irony
     of barbed wire.
 
                                     We step over the barbed wire    into the pasture, outrageous
flowers as big as human / heads.     The truth is you can be orphaned again
    and again and again.     Where my mother once peddled guavas,
she sat a small Dora piñata in her lap   and read a piece about Freud’s Dora
    case study of hysteria,      putting the two Doras in dialogue with one another,
concealed among orchids of subtle idiosyncrasy.
 
                                                                                            In the orchid garden, winter
     like a barbed-wire sash on a white gown        for piñatas to line themselves up
in the snow.      The outrageous Pentecostal rush:      a flesh-pink guava
     growing inside you.      Pewter seedlings became moonlight      orphans,

     orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers—       the ghastly
orchid.    I say guava and mean childhood       stuck in a barb wire snare.
Outrageous    when I’m on the scene        so he’d get the first whack
     at the piñata.

                        Well, what’s in the piñata? they asked.        This orphan,
this foundling,  this outcast.        Outrageous          when I’m at a party,
     my hot mouth for an orchid.       No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping
of books—      the guava of independence.
 
                                                                              Pyramids of onion, guava,
melon—all defy.        Flare like a shocked piñata     crisscrossed the sky
      like barbed wire.         The Baudelaire orphans climbed aboard, wide-
mouthed orchids.            Bibliography    is outrageous.

                                                                                                 Poor little orphan boy
of five:       The haunches of dead lovers gleam       as clear in skulls      as in
the orchid’s velvet crust.     Outrageous / when I
                                                  move                                   my body—.




***
Lines taken from:
  1. Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor.
  2. William H. Dickey’s “The Egoist.”
  3. Billy Collins’s “Silence.”
  4. Judy Brown’s “The Piñata.”
  5. “Las Chavas,” a prose piece by Spencer Reece, in Poetry Magazine: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/70185.
  6. Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Envoy to Palestine.”
  7. James Wright’s “A Blessing.”
  8. Jane Kenyon’s “Peonies at Dusk.”
  9. Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, Survivor.
  10. Richard Blanco’s “The Island Within.”
  11. An interview with Jennifer Tamayo: http://depauliaonline.com/2015/02/09/artist-jennifer-tamayo-talks-dora-the-explorer-and-dreamers/.
  12. Pablo Neruda’s “The Men.”
  13. Teow Lim Goh’s “Black Orchid.”
  14. Rick Barot’s “On Gardens.”
  15. Roberto Harrison’s “[4, 2].”
  16. Norman Cameron’s “Naked Among the Trees.”
  17. Sandra M. Castillo’s “Letter to Yeni on Peering into Her Life.”
  18. Eavan Boland’s “Domestic Violence.”
  19. Adam Johnson’s novel, The Orphan Master’s Son.
  20. Sylvia Plath’s “Fever 103°.”
  21. Chris Abani’s “Sanctificum.”
  22. Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy.”
  23. Britney Spears’s song, “Outrageous.”
  24. Dean Young’s “Sean Penn Anti-Ode.”
  25. Natalie Diaz’s “No More Cake Here.”
  26. Victor Hugo’s novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
  27. Safiya Sinclair’s “How to be an Interesting Woman: A Polite Guide for the Poetess.”
  28. Czeslaw Milosz’s “Incantation.”
  29. Victor Hernández Cruz’s “Airoplain.”
  30. Maurya Simon’s “Russell Market.”
  31. Lee Herrick’s “How to Spend a Birthday.”
  32. Bruce Weigl’s “Song of Napalm.”
  33. Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.
  34. Claude McKay’s “After the Winter.”
  35. An interview with C. Dale Young on Divedapper.com: https://www.divedapper.com/interview/c-dale-young/.
  36. Edgar Albert Guest’s “The Little Orphan.”
  37. Anne Higgins’s “Georgia O’Keeffe Looks Over Her Shoulder.”



Las Criadas

    a loose cento-sestina

I’ve seen a virgin on her knees        feeling around in the mud, / as if
               for a child.     All bleach burns        down the hard hardwood
of middle-America’s  free will            in a shroud of tortilla the
maid brought              green mangoes, salt,   a type of /bread.

                The poem as hotel maid.          Virgin married to the welfare
and the tribe of tortilla chips         -and-salsa lovers.     If our mothers
               are mud     where else in all America are we so symbolized
in bleach cream / creamy spin.
 
                                                                     A spiritual home, this bleach taste
in the waterglass.             You got maids that have longevity
               beyond what you ever conceived of
in your wildest dreams.               The pure products of America / go crazy--
               ¡ay, virgen, yo no sé hablar!          My ungainly body stumping
over the mud flats with a look of transformation           porque hay pocas
                cosas en el mundo que unas tortillas de harina          no puedan curar.

                To the west,       crossers lift the tortilla              one hairpin, a bottle
of / bleach, a switchblade           and a jar of Vaseline.   Over the mud
floor of a barrio Saturday night                  where they manufacture old maids
                blood on the Virgin, behind the veils,                     America never was
America to me.
 
                             We are not hostages, America—             face of the tortilla
              of coins for the ferryman              & La Virgen burning.    Bleach
disguised the glistening corpus.             To play a maid, she must put on
             an accent her family lost a generation ago.        Walls shiver,
the old house caulked with mud.

                                   All around me was black mud               and the people
all looked as if they had been made up    out of the black mud.
              It wasn’t our American terrorists.         The maid was in the garden
stacking a freshly made batch of tortillas into a neat pile.       Only the sun
              will bleach his bones quicker little virgin,
fitted out in white / behind the glass.
 
                                                                           Virgin of naming
and renaming places        in between:     I’ll bleach them
      and hang them in the sun       as we tear the tortilla
                                                                            and wipe the plate clean.




​***
Lines taken from:
  1. Tato Laviera’s “my graduation speech.”
  2. Jennifer Givhan’s “Sin Vergüenza (Como los Pájaros).”
  3. Barbara Jane Reyes’s “[galleon prayer].”
  4. Amy Clampitt’s “Athena.”
  5. Juan Felipe Herrera’s “Blood on the Wheel.”
  6. Emilia Phillips’s “Dream of the Phone Booth.”
  7. Josephine Jacobsen’s “Virgin in Glass.”
  8. Lenelle Moïse’s “mud mothers.”
  9. James Tate’s “Fuck the Astronauts.”
  10. Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay.”
  11. Jamaica Kincaid’s short story, “What I Have Been Doing Lately.”
  12. Jay Wright’s “Boleros 14”
  13. Louise Erdrich’s “Family Reunion.”
  14. Khadijah Queen’s “__________ my loved blacknesses & some blacknesses I knew.”
  15. Karen Solie’s “Bitumen.”
  16. Kevin Young’s “Negative.”
  17. Jane Kenyon’s “Not Here.”
  18. Audre Lorde’s “Power.”
  19. Warsan Shire’s “The House.”
  20. C. Dale Young’s “Corpus Medicum.”
  21. Saadi Youssef’s “America, America.”
  22. Langston Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again.”
  23. Amy Lowell’s “The Congressional Library.”
  24. Ada Limón’s “Roadside Attractions with the Dogs of America.”
  25. Amiri Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America.”
  26. William Carlos Williams’s “To Elsie.”
  27. Ray Gonzalez’s “Praise the Tortilla, Praise Menudo, Praise Chorizo.”
  28. Emmy Pérez’s “The River on Our Face.”
  29. Amit Majmudar’s “Twin Gluttons.”
  30. Gary Soto’s “Ode to La Tortilla.”
  31. Article titled, “Rising price of tortillas piles pressure on Mexico,” written by Jude Webber, published here: https://www.ft.com/content/d2b73384-d7c1-11e6-944b-e7eb37a6aa8e
  32. Sherman Alexie’s novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
  33. Catalina Aguilar Mastretta’s novel, Todos los días son nuestros.
  34. Constance Urdang’s “The Old Maid Factory.”
  35. Two interviews with actress Lupe Ontiveros:
    1. Mireya Navarro’s “Trying to Get Beyond the Role of the Maid; Hispanic Actors Are Seen as Underrepresented, With the Exception of One Part.”
    2. Alison Bryce’s “Latina Actress Aims to Break Maid Stereotype.”
  36. Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel.”
  37. Mother Goose’s “Sing a Song of Sixpence.”
  38. Lisa Alvarado’s “Anthem.”
 





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Roy G. Guzmán is an MFA candidate in creative writing at the University of Minnesota. His work has appeared or will appear in Poetry, Winter Tangerine, Juked, and Superstition Review, and anthologized in IMANIMAN: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands (Aunt Lute Books) and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States (Tia Chucha Press). Roy
is the recipient of a 2017 Minnesota State Arts Board grant and the 2016 Gesell Award for Excellence in Poetry. After the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, his poem “Restored Mural for Orlando” was turned into a chapbook to raise funds for the victims. Website: roygguzman.com; Twitter: @dreamingauze.