Laura Jaramillo, Making Water

 

I’ve never liked anything more than time. The rites of spring in the strip mall parking lot. What flesh can do in masses with the violet day through the slats. A tendency to float de-realized above the afternoon, bodies on the gravel.

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People ask if in America we only eat hamburgers. Dust that traverses the sun’s rays down to its depth (“QUARRY”)

The latest from Queens poet and Durham, North Carolina resident Laura Jaramillo is the poetry collection Making Water (New York NY: Futurepoem Books, 2022), a thread of fifteen extended sequences constructed via short lyric bursts of prose layerings. “Failure not visible on body’s surface yet.” she writes, early in the poem “AUTOIMMUNITY,” “She picked up a small magazine called Time Cuts Us into Pieces.” Her second collection, appearing a decade after the publication of her full-length debut, Material Girl (subpress, 2012), Jaramillo’s Making Water writes across and aside narratives, composing an extended, taut, lyric book-length sentence as an indictment on language, poetry and community; of poets, readers, relationships and other losses. “I sold most of my books.” she writes, early in the poem “BAD MAGIC,” “The city will forget my face tomorrow [.]” Two pages further, she offers: “I will never be so alone again as I was then / and it aches [.]”

Through this book-length sentence of accumulations, Jaramillo works the long poem to articulate desolation, agency, nostalgia, loss and longing that extends through and across poles of trauma and melancholy. These are poems on love that articulate being, and the aftereffects and conditions of heartbreak, while seeking out, fully and finally, a most difficult sequence of possible truths. There is such an elegant tension to her lines, such a lush and beautiful anxiety through her extended lyric. The only way around, one might say, is through, and she articulates her progress with such delicate, difficult beauty. As the poem “BAD MAGIC” continues: “All of history the story of its retraction. The squats and encampments taken over by the knifey glamour of filial names and economics, the ecstasy of class and mirrored display. If the storage unit throws our clothes and our letters in the trash, let us not live / in remembrance of them [.]”