Rosa Alcalá, YOU: poems

 

You, Supplicant

Over sashimi tostadas and chelas, you tell your girlfriends about the time you kneeled on the carpeted stairs that led to the bedroom of the guy who dumped you, pleading. O, his long hair—his thinness—like Jesus! They said they couldn’t see it. “You, for a man, begging?” And how his roommate gently lifted you to your feet, an act of kindness like so many meted out in those days by men adjacent to another man’s destruction. He was trying to pull you from the image of yourself, not as beautiful but as a supplicant before beauty. A penitent whose suffering was the deep and persistent condition of being a woman. It was, like dictatorship, like First Communion, a perversion. You didn’t say this to your girlfriends. You moved on to translation problems, and your humiliations remained fuzzy backdrops, like bookcases in author photos.

The fourth full-length collection by Texas-based poet Rosa Alcalá is YOU: poems (Minneapolis MN: Coffee House Press, 2024), “a collection of prose poetry exploring the intergenerational inheritance of gendered violence.” In a striking assemblage of lyric scenes composed via a suite of hefty prose poems, Alcalá writes on age and of distance, gendered violence and teenaged exploration, focusing on points along the path from child to young woman to becoming and being the mother of a young daughter. “What I mean to say is that this book is still about my mother,” she writes, as part of the opening poem, “How It Started, How It’s Going {An Introduction},” “that in the absence of her I mothered myself all over again with worry, / which is how I mother. // I spoke to myself, the only recourse when you’re / invisible.” Alcalá composes her poems through an accumulation of direct statements that unfold, unfurl, each sentence another card placed, face up, on the table. She is showing you her cards, more often than not as a warning. “Everything was lies,” she writes, as part of the poem “You Lie,” “and there was nothing / to keep you from your own fabrications, no eternal fire.” And then, how to warn her daughter without gifting her a new trauma; how to protect without offering frightening tales of what could happen, or what had happened to her.

The “you” of Alcalá’s title suggests both singular and the multiple, from the narrator’s emerging self to the multitude of male abusers to the narrator’s daughter, instead directed as the second-person “you” spoken by the narrator to and of the narrator. “Run into a school if a man is chasing you. Run into a church. Fall in love / with art and mess up your dress.” she writes, to open the poem “Your Mother’s Advice.” These are direct statements offered as wisdoms and warnings to the self, offering as both witness and document, declaration and exclamation. “That it was the only / thing you had to give.” she writes, as part of the poem “What You Knew About Virginity,” “That once you handed it over, you could never get it / back.” Alcalá writes that this is a book about her mother, but really, this is a book about her daughter, and attempting to clarify and come to terms with the past in order to properly communicate those concerns, without offering trauma, to her own daughter. “In the early and lonely days of mothering,” she writes, to open the poem “You & the Dying Languages,” “when you felt old at forty-one, / you’d examine pictures posted of homegrown arugula, read updates on / a chicken coop’s constructions, the adoption of a baby goat.” The poem offers a frustration of feeling useless as a new parent, unable to offer her daughter the language of her forebears, but in a further poem, “Your Daughter Refashions the Flag into a Crop Top,” we see how the narrator catches her daughter’s reactions, her confidences, writing: “Cecilia once thought she had to choose between poetry and painting, but / she no longer believes this and is recovering what was lost, rejected, sto- / len. To your daughter you bequeath what was left of the flag, and reject- / ing its unflattering form, she refashions it into a crop top to show off / her midriff. She’s on the verge of something, that beautiful precipice.” Through a sustained line of gestures and clear, perfect prose, Alcalá’s lyrics reach across the details of a life for the sake of questions, lessons and survival, working to break through cycles of inherited violence. “Because your fathers fled a dictatorship only to set up their own,” she writes, to open the poem “While Your Fathers Did Second Shifts,” a sentence that seems to hold the space of an entire universe within, “and / took with them the belief that a woman shouldn’t enter a bar unless it / was an emergency and had to use the pay phone, you shared with your / cousins one eyeliner pencil, applying in rearview mirrors the blackest / breves to lower lids.” This is a collection of incredible strength and wisdom, much of it hard-won, but one that emerges out the other side, stronger for having not only survived, but thrived.