I believed, once, in Ouija boards, of standing in front of my own reflection mouthing Bloody _______, Bloody ______ , Bloody ________ —& how still I hesitate because I know words transfigure tongues as easily as brain, transfigure to spells cast without my consent—in anticipation of monsters who don’t resemble my cheek bones, my clavicle, my left ear lobe slightly tipping forward, who don’t live in motel rooms— someone says Bates & I wish myself Hitchcock not Perkins—in Number 3: a counting of three brown kids drawn inside a blueprint, blueprint of a 1950s motel drawn with charcoal so the pencil may turn at any moment to eraser. I believed, once, in a spirit here, then broken. I name this in my lungs with breath in heaves in singed burn rhyming my name already in astral plane.
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Gloria*, I’m scared too. A mouth open. A mouth closed. This page a mouth: chewing corners raw, grinding down molars to indistinguishable rubble & with jaws, I sift, build voice from chalky dust.
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Ohio fog brings the scent of acorn & wet soil. Behind the Alden Motel, I lift the same acorn, 623 miles away, 32 years in the past. We pretend to know time. Nothing more elusive than imprint of an imprint of compounding seconds, minutes, hours metabolizing in flesh. I grow age in bones as thistle: the weed wanting garden.
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Buzz. Grandpa called him Buzz. So we called him Buzz. A singular name. Name in resistance to memory. Buzz, a sound reverberating tongue & molars & mandible. The Alden Motel’s Madonna—our Prince among the rows & rows of ears, fields of ears: corn & flesh alike. Don’t ask questions. Grandpa’s words seeded in hearts & lungs, yet our brains persisted. Our minds in constant disobey back then. During the 1992 presidential election, the first time I saw Ross Perot on tv, I said, That man looks like Buzz. Smallness held in limits of gravel, tree lines, train tracks, sheep bleats by the motel—before shear.
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Finch’s carcass flattens grass. Left wing severed down to nub. Right wing expands—coverts & tertials in full spread, before. Acknowledgment of another type of flight.
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Gloria, I itch at borders; the deep scrape before puss erupts in fountain from the body & my own flesh under my nails, thinking this too another type of relocation. The migration inside me itches to bone. Stayed too long? the voice in marrow wonders. Too long where? my ventricles ask, in search of burrow, of dirt of the dirt where my cells root & I taste language withheld from my tongue; how the discomfort of contradictions aches. How body. Possession of me. I commune with my own nakedness. I am a mouth. A mouth speaking unsettling things.
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Humus lends the soil fertility. Decompose me under a Strawberry Moon, when my larynx refuses respiration & phonation, a gift handed back to plants & animals that lay beside in dirt. Buzz died in Number 8. Office phone ringing off the hook. I had a dream, Felicia. Mel called from her dorm. Is Buzz okay? Mel knew before my mom knocking, before the spare key, before we found his body. She knew, the way a spirit touches your shoulder & says, Don’t cry & you cry none the less.
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Grandpa Bernard ate liver and pickled pigs’ feet. Grandpa Bernard’s square face resembled the old man from Up. I cry intermittently throughout that movie. Every. Time. Grandpa Bernard raised fists. Grandpa Bernard called me faker just before my appendix burst. Grandpa Bernard said, Don’t throw away that box, that’s a good box. Remnants from the 30’s, shadows of enough. Variations of depression. Grandpa Bernard held my wrists until they bruised. Grandpa Bernard spit words: spic & dirty & beaner at my brown face over & over. I read Traumatology is a branch of medicine. Vocabulary of wounds—he trained me in the etymology & phonology of ache.
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What exists in the gaps: wanting wanting.
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In tempered light, clouds constrict the morning walk after fireworks—bloody paw prints, twenty- seven on concrete; a wound gone missing.
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Always talking about race. Of dandelion whose flower eventually turns to seed head, to love of the sickening cycle & to decimation. Language’s hidden spots, sunken. To resist, I move my elbow, twist around my ankle, raise & lower my shoulder blades: a dissecting of what motion means to a body with inertia, with momentum in lug after lug—all before a pulmonary quiet.
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In his last years, Grandpa Bernard barely washed. His atrophied leg, a slender twig from once girthy log and lower jaw partially removed: an orange sized tumor— reminders of an earlier version of person in his bones. Half-grown stubble weeds from his chin & a lingering odor of skin withheld too long from water & soap & musty sting of ripe pubic hair. Yesterday, out on my walk, I inhaled the same stench, aroma wafting from my flesh, hair follicles, sweat glands. What else does my body harbor in the lineage of sour?
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Gloria, I want to empty. Yet. The damn game where I stand in front of the mirror. I want saliva of naming, to wet my howl on something other than grief. I dig. I dig. I dig. I dig. I dig. I dig. I dig. In the unearthing, I find.
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I hid a mouse behind the carport. I scooped weight of a small, bulbous thing onto cardboard & hid behind the carport. I sat with the inanimate form of the mouse until dusk. My forehead in my hands, I wanted to believe we prayed together, prayer for release. Only one of us held the log. One of us did what he told us to do. I understood haunting that evening, what might possess.
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Gloria, I too grope for words. My dustdevil heart. All this time, I chase my own ribs, each stair of bone, a climb. I chase my own innards. I am not alone.
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Gloria, my expectations continue to condition me: when he told me, You’ll amount to nothing, your words, only just written, unread by my five-year-old eyes, found their way into my bloodstream. Chicana daughter of doubt—I label myself now. I am a dangerous beast. I bring discomfort in shaking the white gaze brown, in my skin, in mind thinking, in desires manifesting. I spread claws wide in the mirror. Lick fangs. Rar Rar Rar.
* All epistolary to Gloria is in conversation with Gloria Anzaldúa and the essay, “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers”
