Paul Hlava Ceballos, banana [ ]

 

Genesis

The first day in the garden, God was
an immigrant who planted gulls

in clouds. Even the smallest
leaflet untangled

solar filaments with prudence
dissimilar to fire.

If culture’s root is care, it matters
the object of care is visible.

Did Adam first teach God the word semilla
or resource extraction?

Did God lack the word for monocrop
when she raised its sugar from raw earth?

Each body has its own small gravity.
The banana pulled the world when it fell.

Winner of the 2021 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry is Seattle-based poet Paul Hlava Ceballos’ full-length poetry debut, banana [   ] (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022), published as part of the Pitt Poetry Series. banana [   ] is a collection of powerful lyrics that manage a lean density, intertwining personal and political histories, and offering a perspective from a culture too often deemed outside the American centre. He writes of racism, from an underpinning of language and violence to elegies of those lost through the deliberate actions of those claiming to exist as protectors. “When a concerned citizen pinned / me to airport wall to check my // origin,” he writes, as part of the poem “Split,” “I whispered, thank you. / My dad says, Good, we’re safer now. / My uncle: then leave the country.” He writes of American imperialism across Central America, and of the ongoing toll endured through violences ranging from cultural and human devastation to the most casual and everyday act of racism and dismissal. He writes of a culture too many self-buried, in order to survive, or even endure. “So she cut her native tongue to protect her kin,” he writes, as part of the second poem “Genesis,” which opens the book’s third section, “forced me to scrub peeling linoleum on my hands and knees / handed down ass-whoopings with a wooden spoon / dabbed lagañas at weepy corners of midnight [.]”

Ceballos’ use of experimental form and structure engages with a culture that has, over time, become essentially interwoven into the fabric of the American cultural and political landscape. “Immigration is not a void / of desire nor long histories / of dropped fire that blossoms in air,” he writes, to open the poem “Blossom Is Pollen in Transit.” The poem, further on, ending: “can we plumb blue depths of those shared / years to be not-numb not-nothing / whole as a neighbor as a kiss [.]” He works through the threads of history, of histories, offering an insight from a perspective that refuses to be overrun, and stories that need to be told. He writes of border patrols, and an agent involved with a shooting, lost kingdoms, and, as the poem “Elegy for Sergio Adrián Hernández Güerca” writes, a “boy-shaped body / in permanent fall [.]” As the poem “Rahua Ocllo, Queen and Mother,” one of six poems in a suite of “Kingdom of the Americas Sonnets” ends: “Men taught me body is a debt / to lust or sun-god, paid with life. / I was born, married off, alive / as curse. When a white man bought me, // he did not know my pitted heart. / I smile. My love will bury him.”