She Walks in Beauty_ A Woman's Journey Through Poems - Caroline Kennedy [26]
get all the lovin you want
“clap and syph aint much worse than sore fingers, blind eyes, and
t.m.”
Maria Vasquez, spinster,
for fifteen cents a dozen stitches garments for children she has
never had,
Catalina Torres, mother of four,
to keep the starved body starving, embroiders from dawn to
night.
Mother of four, what does she think of,
as the needle pocked fingers shift over the silk—
of the stubble-coarse rags that stretch on her own brood,
and jut with the bony ridge that marks hunger’s landscape
of fat little prairie-roll bodies that will bulge in the
silk she needles?
(Be not envious, Catalina Torres, look!
on your own children’s clothing, embroidery,
more intricate than any a thousand hands could fashion,
there where the cloth is raveled, or darned,
designs, multitudinous, complex and handmade by Poverty
herself.)
Ambrosa Espinoza trusts in god,
“Todos es de dios, everything is from god,”
through the dwindling night, the waxing day, she bolsters herself
up with it—
but the pennies to keep god incarnate, from ambrosa,
and the pennies to keep the priest in wine, from ambrosa,
ambrosa clothes god and priest with hand-made children’s dresses.
Her brother lies on an iron cot, all day and watches,
on a mattress of rags he lies.
For twenty-five years he worked for the railroad, then they laid him off
(racked days, searching for work; rebuffs; suspicious eyes of
policemen.)
goodbye ambrosa, mebbe in dallas I find work; desperate swing
for a freight,
surprised hands, clutching air, and the wheel goes over a
leg,
the railroad cuts it off, as it cut off twenty-five years of his life.)
She says that he prays and dreams of another world, as he lies
there, a heaven (which he does not know was brought to earth
in 1917 in Russia, by workers like him).
Women up north, I want you to know
when you finger the exquisite handmade dresses
what it means, this working from dawn to midnight,
on what strange feet the feverish dawn must come
to maria, catalina, ambrosa,
how the malignant fingers twitching over the pallid faces jerk them
to work,
and the sun and the fever mounts with the day—
long plodding hours, the eyes burn like coals, heat jellies the
flying fingers,
down comes the night like blindness.
long hours more with the dim eye of the lamp, the breaking
back,
weariness crawls in the flesh like worms, gigantic like earth’s in
winter.
And for Catalina Rodriguez comes the night sweat and the blood
embroidering the darkness.
for Catalina Torres the pinched faces of four huddled
children,
the naked bodies of four bony children,
the chant of their chorale of hunger.
And for twenty eight hundred ladies of joy the grotesque act gone
over—
the wink—the grimace—the “feeling like it baby?”
And for Maria Vasquez, spinster, emptiness, emptiness,
flaming with dresses for children she can never fondle.
And for Ambrosa Espinoza—the skeleton body of her brother on
his mattress
of rags, boring twin holes in the dark with his eyes to the image of
christ
remembering a leg, and twenty-five years cut off from his life by
the railroad.
Women up north, I want you to know,
I tell you this can’t last forever.
I swear it won’t.
PS Education
ELLEN HAGAN
Take all the metal detectors apart and build imaginary cities with them. Then my 7th graders can build a utopia and walk around in it. Tell Harold, the security guard, who sings only Tito Puente songs, that he can have his own music room, and buy gold trumpets and trombones that slide like hot oil. Buy drums that rumble the whole school: da-dum, da-dum. Build a garden as big as the football field at Taft High School and feed everything. Tell Myles he can have a quiet room to fall asleep in, because I know he is tired. I know you are tired, Myles, but you cannot keep calling Russell a fat fuck, “Yo Russell, you fat fuck,” over and over until Russell has to stand up and punch Myles where he deserves it most. And why not? Call Russell a genius, who sure knows how to write about his grandma and the shiny wheelchair she