Lima :: Limón - Softcover

Scenters-Zapico, Natalie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 155659531X ISBN 13: 9781556595318

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2019

Synopsis

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“Through a range of forms―tercets, prose hybrids, lyric strophes, and more―the poems in Scenters-Zapico’s second collection . . . incisively interrogate the aesthetics of cultural difference.” ―Publishers Weekly, starred review In her striking second collection, Natalie Scenters-Zapico sets her unflinching gaze once again on the borders of things. Lima :: Limón illuminates both the sweet and the sour of the immigrant experience, of life as a woman in the U.S. and Mexico, and of the politics of the present day. Drawing inspiration from the music of her childhood, her lyrical poems focus on the often-tested resilience of women. Scenters-Zapico writes heartbreakingly about domestic violence and its toxic duality of macho versus hembra, of masculinity versus femininity, and throws into harsh relief the all-too-normalized pain that women endure. Her sharp verse and intense anecdotes brand her poems into the reader; images like the Virgin Mary crying glass tears and a border fence that leaves never-healing scars intertwine as she stares down femicide and gang violence alike. Unflinching, Scenters-Zapico highlights the hardships and stigma immigrants face on both sides of the border, her desire to create change shining through in every line. Lima :: Limón is grounding and urgent, a collection that speaks out against violence and works toward healing.

About this title

About the Author

Natalie Scenters-Zapico is the author of The Verging Cities, as well as the recipient of the PEN American/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and the National Association of Chicano/a Studies Book Award.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Hunt As a child a macho told me to close my legs or he’d take me to a dark room & make me cry. I closed my legs. He asked me to give him a kiss. I gave him a kiss. I could not stop crying, & he could not understand why. :: My father was a ghost in our house. He would not speak for days, then drop a glass of water on the kitchen floor. My mother always swept up his shatters & buried them in the yard. :: At thirteen a macho put his hands on my knees, then became tarantula, travelled up my skirt. I didn’t scream because I felt chosen. I felt lucky he had chosen me to be hunted. :: Machos hunt to watch women in orgasm. Not because they like to see women in pleasure, but because they like to watch women close to death. :: Machos don’t know what it is to give birth to the dead. Machos know pleasure through release. Machos hunt to give pain & to witness pleasure. To testify: the resurrection of the body. :: I will not apologize for my desire to love a macho who could crush my skull with his bare fists. :: I apologize to a daughter for telling her to close her legs. Machos are hunting, always hunting to see women close to death. :: I work two jobs & still come home to an empty pantry. I am a bad woman when I can’t feed hunger. My labor: the taste of bleach after an alacrán stings my feet. :: I write to machos & never send my letters. In the age of los Zetas, I am a lucky hembra: I have a language to write of the violence of machos. :: I watch the azahars grow into lemons machos pull too early from their branches. I slice each lemon’s rind into translucent sheets & place each little sun under the tongue of my macho who eats & eats. Macho :: Hembra I laughed because, after all, isn’t that what women do―laugh at jokes at their own expense? I was his pocha hermosa. He’d done good because of my fair skin & green eyes. He liked keeping me in my underwear in his room. Like a porcelain doll come to life, I was the perfect object. I screamed & was ashamed. He’d hand me matches & I’d strike each one against my teeth to make a flame. I’d whisper in his ear bruto & he’d hush me with the word hocicona. I’d cry & he’d kiss me quiet. My whole face fit in his cupped hands. He was el macho :: I was la hembra. To clean his body I’d blow smoke from my cigarette on his shoulders. I told myself I had found un buen macho. He was mi cielo: sky of my many deaths. Lima Limón: :Infancia I want to be the lemons in the bowl on the cover of the magazine. I want to be round, to be yellow, to be pulled from branches. I want to be wax, to be white with pith, to be bright, to be zested in the corners of a table. I want you to say my name like the word: Lemon. Say it like the word: Limón. Undress me in strands of rind. I want my saliva to be citrus. I want to corrode my husband’s wedding ring. I want to be a lemon with my equator marked in black ink― small dashes to show my shape: pitted & convex.

Edition details

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 155659531X
• ISBN 13: 9781556595318
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 90