Bird Eating Bird
Poems
Kristin Naca
In memory of beloved teacher and mentor, Carl Mills
Contents
Acknowledgments
Speaking English Is Like
Todavía no
Not Yet
“Gavilán o Paloma”
Uses for Spanish in Pittsburgh
Ode to Glass
Baptism
One Foot
Grocery Shopping with My Girlfriend Who Is Not Asian
Language Poetry / Grandma’s English
Tres Mujeres
Las Meninas / The Maids of Honor
Becoming
Falling, Calle Orizaba
What I Don’t Tell My Children About the Philippines
Glove
Revenant Gladness
Corazón como un reloj
Heart Like a Clock
Rear Window
House
Manejar, I-80 Nebraska
Driving, I-80 Nebraska
Witness
The Adoration at El Montan Motor Lodge
While Watching Dallas, My Filipina Auntie Grooms Me for Work at the Massage Parlor
Seguir
Seguir: To Follow, Keep On, Continue
In the Time of the Caterpillars
Hablar español sigue así
Speaking Spanish Is Like
In Mexico City
Catching Cardinals
Notes
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to ensure the publication of five poetry books annually through five participating publishers. Publication is funded by the Lannan Foundation; Stephen Graham; Joyce & Seward Johnson Foundation; Glenn and Renee Schaeffer, Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation; and Charles B. Wright III.
2008 Open Competition Winners
Anna Journey of Houston, Texas, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting
Chosen by Thomas Lux, to be published by University of Georgia Press
Douglas Kearney of Van Nuys, California, The Black Automaton
Chosen by Catherine Wagner, to be published by Fence Books
Adrian Matejka of Edwardsville, Illinois, Mixology
Chosen by Kevin Young, to be published by Penguin Books
Kristin Naca of Minneapolis, Minnesota, Bird Eating Bird
Chosen by Yusef Komunyakaa for the National Poetry Series MTVU Prize, to be published by Harper Perennial
Sarah O’Brien of Brookfield, Ohio, catch light
Chosen by David Shapiro, to be published by Coffee House Press
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The generosity of so many enabled me to complete this collection. I owe the greatest debt to my family: Christian and Lisa, Michael, Rosalin, Puring, Ralph and Mary. And my family: Julianne McAdoo, Nikki Ono, Bill and Alejandro Sanchez, Roger Solis, Arturo Madrid and Antonia Castañeda, Omar Rodríguez and Verónica Prida, my Elena, Jim Clawson, Vicente Lozano, Carla Trujillo and Leslie Larson, Anel Flores, Chris Cuomo and Karen Schlanger, Erin Flanagan, Maxine Leckie, Derek Walker, Chris Byrne, Leah and Macauley Devun, Stacey Berry and Andre Jordan, Barbara Banfield, Kate Nelson, Padrino, Madrina, and the Macondistas.
Thanks to many professors and writing teachers who responded to my work with generosity. Special thanks goes to my committee members at University of Pittsburgh and University of Nebraska. For their wisdom and unflinching belief, thank you, Sandra Cisneros and Hilda Raz.
To my friends who wore down their fingernails against my drafts: Dina Rhoden, Nancy Krygowski, Heather Green, Mathias Svalina, Jehanne Dubrow, Lois Williams, Jan Beatty, Ellen Placey Wadey, Jeff Oaks, Chingbee Cruz, Renato Rosaldo, Diana Delgado, Marcia Ochoa, Nick Carbó, Eileen Tabios, Hadara Bar-Nadav, and Chuck Rybak. For all their timely advice: John Marshall and Christine Deavel of Open Books. Thank you, Joy, for your horses.
Special thanks to María L. Lorenzo, at University of Nebraska, whose generous feedback and encouragement made my writing poems in Spanish possible. Thanks to Hedgebrook, and UN-L, for providing fellowships and time to write. Thanks to my colleagues at Macalester College. Thanks to painter Heather Hagle for her friendship and vision. And thanks to the National Poetry Series for the support of my work, Michael Signorelli at Harper Perennial for his enthusiasm, Yusef Komunyakaa, and everyone at MTV for giving me “My Shot with Yusef Komunyakaa.”
These poems originally appeared in the following venues:
5AM: “While Watching Dallas, My Auntie Grooms Me for Work at the Massage Parlor”
THE ASIAN PACIFIC AMERICAN JOURNAL: “Grocery Shopping with my Girlfriend Who Is Not Asian”
THE CINCINNATI REVIEW: “Heart Like a Clock”
CRAB ORCHARD REVIEW: “Uses for Spanish in Pittsburgh”
HARPUR PALATE: “Baptism,” “In the Time of the Caterpillars”
INDIANA REVIEW: “Todavía no,” “Not Yet”
THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW: “What I Don’t Tell My Children about the Philippines”
OCHO: THE MiPOesias PRINT JOURNAL COMPANION: “Speaking English Is Like,” “Glove,” “Adoration at El Montan”
PINOY POETICS: A COLLECTION OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL ESSAYS ON FILIPINO AND FILIPINO AMERICAN POETICS: “Language Poetry / Grandma’s English”
OCTOPUS: “House”
PRAIRIE SCHOONER: “Ode to Glass,” “One Foot,” “Las Meninas / The Maids of Honor,” “Rear Window,” “Witness”
RIO GRANDE REVIEW: “Speaking Spanish Goes Like This”
RIO GRANDE REVIEW ONLINE: “Catching Cardinals”
Her Spanish sounds like sunlight drying a wet shirt.
And in the process, I’ve grown fond of her.
She’s delicadeza, a word that names her nature.
Whose dream deepens in the rain? Whose hair is lilacs?
SPEAKING ENGLISH IS LIKE
Brown and beige and blonde tiles set in panels of tile across the bathroom floor.
Wakes curled into the pavement by traffic, the asphalt a slow, gray tide.
A loose floorboard hiding the gouges chunked out of the floor.
Tawny red curtains hamstrung in the quick, morning light.
Her body oils like sage in a shirt, in the bed sheets.
Pigeons on a line and in the gutters.
The staple that misfires and jams the hammer.
The tender, black wick at the top of a candle’s waxy lip.
The lonely woman secretly dying her curtains red at the Laundry Factory.
The purple and purple-blue berry sacks tethered to a blackberry rind.
Branches lolled by the weight of voluminous, tender sacks.
The path along the lake lit up with the pitch of purple stars.
Mouthfuls of lavender at the height of August.
Her lips, red gathering in the creases when she puckers.
Endings that are dirty tricks and also feathers.
Red water out the pipes, teeming from the rusty gutters.
The curtain flicker in the leafy, August breeze.
The ghostly cu-cu echoing through the purple night, under stars.
TODAVÍA NO
Los pedazos de la lengua quedan tan gordos y abultados como flores.
Dime, árbol. Son los que están allá solamente ramas desnudas y alguna corteza.
Todavía no, no hay palabras para hacer capas de piel sobre la primavera.
El color verde se difumina sin leaves.
El único pájaro que aterriza allí es el halcón.
En el espejo, el reflejo de su pelo es castañas labradas.
Las venas de la cala están labradas con paredes. No, piedras. N
o, pérdidas.
Mientras tanto, tus manos están hechas de nudillos y hechas de piel.
En la ventana, el cristal se superpone al árbol desnudo afuera.
Sin fingernails, solamente clavos. Los dedos-garras. Los dedos-lanzas, dice ella.
La ropa en la cama está limpia y suelta.
La mujer en la cama espera no morir mientras duerme…despierta…despierta.
El halcón la aguada en el árbol desnudo, más allá de la ventana, más allá de los muros.
La canción del pájaro superpone a la noche despejada, la deja despierta.
Todavía no, todas las canciones que canta, le da de comer al halcón.
Todas las noches que espera ella, le da de comer a la muerte.
NOT YET
The nubs of the tongue sit fat and bulky as flowers.
Say, tree. What’s there but bare branches and some bark.
No words for putting layers of skin on spring yet.
Green glows loose without its leaves.
The only bird that lands there is the falcon.
In the mirror, the reflection of her hair is carved chestnuts.
The veins of the creek encrusted with walls. No, stones. No, losing.
Meanwhile your hands are made of knuckles and made of skin.
In the window, glass overlaps the naked tree outside.
No fingernails, just the nails. Finger-claws. Finger-swords, she says.
The laundry on the bed is clean and limp.
The woman in her bed hopes she doesn’t die in her sleep…wake up…wake up.
The falcon waits for her in the naked tree, beyond the window, beyond the walls.
The small bird’s song overlaps the clear night, keeps her from her sleep.
Still, every song he sings, he’s food for the falcon.
Every night she waits, she’s food for death.
“GAVILÁN O PALOMA”
—Mexico City
Once a bird pecked her lover’s hand
with such sincerity that she lost
hold of the seeds she secretly tossed,
to keep all the birds at her command.
No dejabas de mirar, you sang me,
last night, estabas sola completamente
bella y sensual, and the notes stirred
loose feather dust from your chest.
you didn’t stop staring
you alone were completely
beautiful and sensual
When you exhaled, your silhouette
dissolved, reddening the D. F. dusk.
Vibrato frayed your veil: how you fled
one city, but betrayal beckoned you;
confess, how lovers nest in branches
of your collarbones while you sleep.
Entre tus brazos caí…consumed
by your song’s, lonesome downbeat.
How I fell into your arms
Paloma,
I know some days begin with birds.
Nights we suffer from too few songs.
Sorrows that each heartbeat prolongs.
Amiga,
Tell me how you’re leaning, before
sunlight bathes the city in pink spells.
Will your voice deliver me morning?
Or, will the caroling street-vendors bells?
USES FOR SPANISH IN PITTSBURGH
What use is there for describing
Bloomfield’s hard-sloping rooftops this way?
Or that the church steeples beam upward, inexpertly
toward God. What difference does it make
to say, the chimney pipes peel their red skins,
or las pieles rojas, exposing tough steel underneath.
What good, then, for Spanish,
its parity of consonants and vowels—
vowels like a window to the throat,
breath chiming through the vocal chords.
And what good is singing to describe
this barrio’s version of the shortened sky,
el cielo cortado—power lines crisscrossing
so high, that blue only teases through them.
And what for fog la niebla arrastra,
creeping down las calles inmóviles
before the bank and grocery store open.
Y por la zapatería on Liberty Avenue,
a lady’s antique boot for a street sign.
And by the shoemaker’s
What use to remember in any language
my father was a Puerto Rican shoe salesman.
From his mouth dangled a ropy, ashy cigarette.
He spoke good English and knew when to smile.
fishing nets
With his strong fingers he’d knot shoes like redes,
knew three kinds of knots so lady customers
could buy the shoes they loved to look at
but really shouldn’t have worn.
At home, Dad kept his lengua íntima
to himself. His Spanish not for children,
only older relatives who forced him to speak,
reminded, Spanish means there’s another person
inside you. All beauty, he’d argue, no power in it.
Still, I remember, he spoke a hushed Spanish
to customers who struggled in English, the ones
he pitied for having no language to live on.
So many years gone, what use to invent
or question him in Pittsburgh? The educated one,
why would I want my clumsy Spanish to stray
from the pages of books outward? My tongue,
he’d think so untrue and inarticulate. Each word
having no past in it. What then? Speaking Spanish
to make them better times or Pittsburgh
a better place. En vez de regresar la dura realidad
del pasado. And then, if I choose to speak like this
who will listen?
Instead of returning
to the hard reality
of the past
ODE TO GLASS
After its lip
the bottle flares out
like the A-line of
a girl’s skirt
when she twirls
at recess.
On the descent
the company’s crest—
one red and one blue
crescent about to
clasp together
into a globe
but between
them, the name
of the soda sits
in bold, white letters.
Below
the slogan
the tiny print:
contenido neto 355 ml,
and hecho en México,
in perfectly
executed paint.
Partway down
the bottle corners
into a barrel-shape,
the swiveled glass,
the same as stripes
of a barber’s pole, forces
the eye to follow
and twist along its
blurred contours,
the way skin blurs
the contours of
an arm so you
slow down into
the elbow’s nook.
And how much
like skin the peach
and brown and blue
reflections inside
the glass lend it
dimension while outside
the surface and shape
are seamless, but
for some stitching
underneath, a zipper
dialed around the
bottle’s base to
serve as feet.
And where
the glass corners
from cone to barrel
a ring carved from
the bottles being
packed too close
and rubbing together
in their crates.
Scars that
&nbs
p; keep dry and
soft as silk, even as
the glass beads, and
you start to trace
the droplets back
over the powder,
and still dry after
you’ve swabbed up
the condensation
and your fingers
have gone clumsy
from the bottle’s
brittle sweat.
When the bottle’s
this cold, the swivels
of glass are charged,
icy bulbs that steal
heat from the nubs
of your fingertips,
so you rub them
to your forehead
and feel nothing
but your own heat
swirl back and forth
from your head
to your hand.
Each time you drink—
the bubbles rising up
through the sweet,
brown liquid, stirring
your nose, then lips—
how easily details
of time slip away and
you’re seven-years-old
again drinking Pepsi
at the sari-sari store
next to Uncle Ulpe’s
house in Manila. And
you guzzle it down.