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Alitha Martinez

“Yume and Ever” original comic book series cover

“All of the great Heroes are dead!”

“Nefarious evil-doers hatch a diabolical scheme to rule the world. Super heroes unite to halt their odious plans.”

Eileen McNamee

“Painting the Bronx”

j.c. rice

“Car Wash Chains”

“Untitled #1″

Toni Roberts

“Breath of Love”

Christy Speakman

“Eye-wall 1″

“Eye-wall 2″

“Eye-wall 3″

Audio

Oscar Bermeo reads “About B-Boys in the Boogie Down” and “In the City, you can’t help but think of God.”

 
Kentaro Yoshida reads an excerpt from his short story “Double Vision.”

The wind made a whistle
from a ripple of the tide
surfing high upon a splinter
at the Orchard Beach side.

The geese felt the ripple
on the nipples of the sea
and they lifted up their nose rings,
flying flutes in synchrony.

Flapping kites with whisper wings
tumbled down on silver strings
and the children rolled in sand
laughing at a horseshoe hand.

The wind strolled out
through the sun drenched crowd
undulating hip sticks
on a pillar of a cloud.

Salsa drums,
mango rum,
disco soul,
rock and roll,
windy flappers,
belly rappers,
old men calling,
basket balling,
hand ball paddles,
rhythmic battles,
bird tapes
and a city skate

board on the arc
of a loose sidewalk,
where the Bronx
reached the sea
and the gulls hung free,

where the Bronx
reached the sea
and the gulls hung free.

And the wind played tag
with a baggie and a raggie,
throwing sand seeds to the children,
chasing sun balls on the ocean.

But the wind
began to holler
when three nuns
turned round the collar
of the shoulder
of a boulder
that rested on the sea.

They pedaled so fast
past meadows of sea glass
that the wheels of their bikes
splattered mud against the spikes

of a giant sea horse
that sunbathed on the porch
of a long sandy spit
where the gully sharks did sit.

The children turned it over
like an old man’s lover
while the wind crept under
the nun’s great wonder.

Black habits billowed freely
on the shadows of the seaweed
while the children ran gawing
at the nun’s black stockings,

and their laughter
filled the rafters
of the clouds
with glee,

and their laughter
filled the rafters
of the clouds
with glee.

 
 
Alice S. Myerson, a long-time resident of the Bronx, is a nurse practitioner, an HIV specialist, a teacher and a human rights worker. She writes: “I raised my daughter, Alethea Pace, on these hard streets. I dug my roots in the fertile soil that nourishes our cement sidewalks and take pride in the hardy plants that flourish here. My daughter is the source of my inspiration as an artist. From her I have learned to be fearless, to try new things, and to constantly seek new edges in my life.” This is Alice’s first publication; she began writing 5 years ago at the onset of the war in Iraq.

Concha was with her harem of young friends, gathered in a semi-circle around the little booth made of wobbly boards where Maritza sold toilet paper, laundry soap, gum and chips in colorful foil bags. It was the only place with a ready electric socket, and Concha had a boom box. With surprising phonetic accuracy, the girls sang along in English to pop tunes on tape. Concha spotted the rat as it darted out from behind the three garbage cans in the corner by the army of colorful brooms.

“Hey-Hey! Una rata!” Concha sounded gleeful. Her voice broke through the contemplation of the crocheting circle, the buzz of the gossip circle and the chatter of the women scrubbing at the laundry sinks. Some women scattered in alarm, others gathered, curious.

“Dios mío!”

“Call the guards!”

“Don’t be ridiculous. What would the guards do?”

“Be careful! Don’t hurt it! Step on its tail!”

“Yeah, remember what it feels like to be cornered. Give him a chance!”

I watched from a distance in my shady spot under the pomegranate where I wrote, moving my pen against the page as the other women moved their crochet hooks through variegated strands of shiny nylon. The women gathered their yarns and rushed to put on their shoes, dispersing.

“Oh, but don’t even think you are going to escape this, my friend!” Concha went after the intruder as the women gave her wide berth. There was general mayhem that fluttered from joyous to repulsive depending on where you stood. Concha was on her stage. “This’ll teach you to come into my turf you sneaky bastard! One less of your kind and we’ll all sleep sounder, eh ladies?”

I thought the guards would come, or Concha would swat it with a broom. But her reputation as the roughest, surliest, most volatile woman in Ixcotel weighted her response. Concha and her rat were captives of each other. When the rolling groan went up from the crowd, most women turned away. I wrote “The tough woman crushed a rat with her foot” and watched as Concha used the disfigured rat as a soccer ball, making graceful, athletic passes through the courtyard. With triumphant bellows of laughter, she kicked her prize until she thought enough women had seen, and then left the remains behind the garbage cans when she was sure it was dead.

“He’s out with the morning garbage! What you all staring at?” She shrugged, plunking down into her white plastic chair, patting at her sneakers as a pistolero would blow curls of smoke from his gun. She ran her hands through her short cap of curly hair spit through with silver and adjusted her tight “No Fear” tee shirt around her thick middle.

The rhythm of the afternoon resumed. The crocheters returned to their bench, and rested their bags of yarn at their feet.

“I am not surprised by anything in this crazy place any more,” Soraya muttered.

I felt well along that same path. Everything seemed crazy since that Monday night just a few weeks back.

***

On that Monday night I did not make sure that Russell, my nonagenarian professor friend and charge, was safely tucked into his book-strewn bed at nine-thirty, as I had every night for three years. I did not ask him where he was in his latest reading of Neruda’s autobiography; and I did not bring a biscuit to the dog at the foot of his bed, scratching her tummy and promising her a walk in the mountains early the next morning. I did not turn off the computer in my writing studio, full of Russell’s collection of dusty volumes. Before bed, I did not set a place at the breakfast table for Russell, with his pink and white pills on a demitasse saucer, alongside the plate with blue flowers where his Siamese cat would share his bacon. I didn’t read Carlos Fuentes, looking first at the mountain washed in moonlight and framed by the jacaranda tree outside my window. I did not pull a thick woven blanket around me in bed, nor smell the age of its heavy wool as I had every night for three years.

That night, I lay on a concrete floor that smelled of insecticide in the Oaxaca State Penitentiary in the town of Ixcotel, on a garish blue Tweety Bird blanket taunting “Pleasant Dreams” in fancy cursive. It was almost midnight by the time I’d been led down an exterior corridor, following two guards dressed in black and dodging whole families of rats. They took me to an unused office, where a rusty sink clogged with gray paint hung against a crumbling wall. There was a half empty snack-sized bag of chili-lemon corn chips in one corner and the Tweety blanket they had arranged for me, which barely fit in the width of the room. Hoarse groans and the sound of a clanging toilet seat came through a barred window near the ceiling.

The photos and fingerprints were done, the body searches and the medical history. Tired clerks had filled out forms in triplicate, pounding earnestly on tinny manual typewriters. No, I have no tattoos. Yes, I went to college. No, I have no specified religion. Yes, I am in Mexico legally. Finally alone, I splashed cold water on my face and fell against the wall, sliding to the floor, dripping.

Tranquila. It will be fine in the morning. Someone will send a lawyer, there will be apologies, and I will go back home. I was worried about Russell. I wanted to sleep so the night would pass quickly; so this would be over. I lay down with Tweety and steadied my breath, bobbing fitfully between dream and reality. The crickets I dreamed under my jacaranda turned shrill and sharp as the guards whistled signals throughout the night. The lone owl on the branch of the ceiba tree by Russell’s tool shed screeched and took off on a great flutter of wings for the dark woods, but it was the guards keeping vigil in the outer corridor, horsing around, playing tag and singing falsetto to the love songs on their radio. I had no pillow to blunt the reality invading my dreams.

I had been a writer living a quiet and participatory life in a rural community, connecting with the Mexico I most loved after 15 years working in Mexican beach tourism. What happened? Few things could surprise me after the tectonic shift that landed me in prison.

Ixcotel. At least it had a tantalizing name.

***

I was first aware of Concha because of her size. We lined up in the courtyard for roll call four times a day, according to the date we arrived. On the first day, I noticed a Gulliver of a woman surrounded by Lilliputians in the lines of the long-timers. Someone whistled at her and as she turned around, I was stunned by her playful face. From the back she was as big as any of the male guards, and I imagined a glower to go with her size. But Concha’s face wasn’t hostile. It was remarkable for its absence of lines and its full cherubic cheeks under eyes that seemed to just barely hold a wink at bay. Her mischievous face was childlike, her proportions otherwise Amazonic. Maybe this made her pose for power more urgent. If you stopped at her face, you might have thought her a soft touch.

“Get any lately, Concha?” The whistler shouted from a few lines over.

“Every night, my friend! Every night!” There was symmetry in her timbre and her body. She laughed large and full, throwing her strong arms around the young woman in front of her and kissing the top of her head. Deep and resonant with a capricious edge, her voice was a fog horn warning of a hulking danger below the surface.

***

At my arraignment, I’d been brought by guards to a small gray room. There were bars along one short wall. Beyond the bars were two desks, two manual typewriters and two clerks. They were to read the accusations and I was to respond. That is what I knew from the five minute visit from Russell’s lawyer, who had been quickly drafted into the role of my defense. Minutes before the proceedings my counsel told me to listen and respond. Nothing more.

Then the fiction unfolded.

In the fat file, inches thick with documents, testimonies, eyewitness accounts all sewn together with thick twine, was a tale of threatening violence. Mine.

On an evening in early May, I was allegedly seen guiding a mid-sized truck onto Russell’s property, and, with sinister intent, commenced to unload furniture. I was taking over. Staking claim. The witness who had reportedly seen me, said she did not stop me for fear of the violence I might direct towards her. She was a representative of the university to which Russell and his wife had donated their land – to take effect upon their deaths. Jean had died three years earlier. Russell just turned ninety-two and was showing few signs of wanting to leave the home where he had lived and loved for more than forty years. This representative whose testimony condemned me regularly visited the house on behalf of the university rector, who also just happened to be the Federal Chief of Security. She came to see if Russell was still alive, I supposed, making small talk about the jasmine or the ruts in the road. I suddenly remembered the phone call she made several months prior, to ask for the spelling of my full name. She must keep thorough records. I spelled clearly and thanked her for calling.

I couldn’t recall any truck on the property that could have been mistaken for this terrifying, conspiratorial truck. I reached for some memory of behavior that could be misconstrued as menacing, some furniture that might have come onto the land improperly.

It was all an invention.

As instructed by the lawyer, I responded. My voice was shaky from not having slept or eaten, but the buoyancy of truth kept me clear. “I am Russell’s friend and have been invited to share his home for the past three years.” When they finished typing my testimony I saw them toss my case file on the floor.

For seventeen years I had studied the lives and landscapes around me because I wanted — more than anything — to fit in. Then, for the six long days that followed – while colluding lawyers and judges “decided” if I would be formally committed and moved from a private room to the compound where 110 imprisoned women lived deprived of freedoms – I met each night with a chant in my brain — that fortune would allow me to slip through the bars… slip through the bars… slip through. I realized that — more than anything — I did not want to be… please, not like them.

“How bad are they in there?” Before being moved in with the general population, the warden checked with the female guards to see if I should surrender my cheap watch.

“They are calm right now.” He let me keep it.

My Mexican friends used to tell me: “The stork made a mistake when it delivered you in el norte. You should have been left down here with us.” Over my years in the country I had worked to Mexicanize myself. I was blonde and blue-eyed, with a dark Latina streak. But I wondered if the prison women would want to crack the marble to assure the vein was authentic.

***

At 29, Concha had already served seven of her fourteen sentenced years for armed robbery at a major Mexico City bank. Capitalizing on the effect that her bulk and swagger had on the women, she had an entourage of handmaids who ironed her jeans, made sure her space in the shower was reserved and washed her clothes every third day. Her music circle was closed, though. Few approached without being invited.

The day after the rat kill, I was sitting in the corner where I wrote at a picnic table. Beside me was an altar with a statue of the Virgen de Guadalupe. Her blue plaster cloak was nicked but her piety intact. Behind her, a faded poster print of the Virgen, and to one side, a creased Virgen postcard taped to the peach colored wall at a short person’s eye level. One more Virgen appeared in a retablo that Fátima had painted on the back of a soup can that had been cut and straightened, depicting the miracle bestowed on her father, when a prayer to the Virgen saved his leg after a tractor accident. The four Virgenes were all draped in a royal blue mantle peppered with stars, each standing on the curved belly of her own crescent moon. A spiky golden halo radiated from her cloak. She was dark skinned with sad, downcast eyes. To the women who invoked her she was more popular than Jesus and stronger than God himself. She posed serene and silent in her niche, her omnipotency cleverly disguised by gently folded hands.

I sat by the quiet Virgen, claiming a space to write. The women came to share a word or a nod with the Lady, but otherwise that corner was far away from the rumble, the gossip and shouts — only three steps removed, but within the radius of solemnity required by the Virgenes.

I looked up from my writing when a dark cloud drifted in front of me. Concha had her arms crossed in front of her chest that jutted out like a shelf. She did not look happy.

“Hey! I have something to say to you, Gringa.” She glared down at me. Concha spoke no English, and her Spanish with her ring of friends was sparked with slang. With me, she kept as straight as she could. She sounded serious.

“Yes?” I wondered under what circumstances someone would refuse Concha.

“You look a little sad today, Gringa.” I expected some version of anger, and got insight. She bit the inside of her cheek and cocked her head to one side. Straddling the bench on the other side of the table she drummed a syncopated riff on the table top with stubby fingers, stopped, and looked me in the eyes.

“Well?”

“Not sad, just thinking.”

“You do a lot of that.” Could have been a question or a command. I saw I couldn’t second guess her.

“Thinking, dreaming, whatever you call it. I write it all down, anyway.”

“You write, like, stories and stuff? I bet you write poems.” I wasn’t sure if she was mocking me. She gave a quick look over her shoulder and settled in on the bench.

“I just write notes right now. Anything to keep my pen moving. I’m like the women who crochet purses. Except I’m not great with a hook.”

“They’d teach you, but stick to your writing. It makes you different. Not that you aren’t already different enough!” She gave me a wink as if she were cluing me into a secret.

“Everyone here calls you Gringa, but I hear the guards called you Mari in roll call.”

“It’s María Elena.”

“Vaya vaya! Yeah, right! A blondie with a Mexican name! Take that bone to another dog – No, what’s your name, really?” Concha was loosening up, getting a kick out of herself. She rocked on the bench.

“Okay, so it’s not what’s on my birth certificate, but my parents just happened to give me a name that translates into Spanish.”

“Maria Elena. Maria Elena — we all figure you must be a teacher or something, since you speak Spanish and write all the time. You gonna teach us English?” Concha didn’t wait to hear if I really was a teacher. She just barreled on, leaning in a little closer. “I’m gonna tell ya something, but you have to promise not to tell anyone.” On Concha, trying to look threatening had an absurd effect — the sun pretending to be hot. I smiled. “Go ahead – promise!”

“I promise.”

“Promise what?” She was enjoying this.

“I promise not to tell anyone what you are going to tell me.”

“Forever!”

“Forever.”

“Okay, Gringa – you asked for it.” Even though I hadn’t. “I write, too,” she whispered.

“You write too?”

“Shhhhh! I said nobody knows. And you won’t see me doing it here.” She made a locking sign over her lips.

A friend who had been in prison in the States gave me a tip in the first days of my confinement in Ixcotel: blend in and buddy up to the toughest, meanest women there. I had muddled success with trying to blend. I swept with the women, but unaccustomed to the task, I had to hide my bloody blisters. I sat in the circles of women that formed in the courtyard, but left suddenly to receive visitors. Concha took care of the buddying up. If bullies had wings, I was under one.

“So – you write poetry, right?”

“No, I’m just rehashing what the lawyer told me this morning. See all these folders? The blue one has notes, the brown one has letters coming in, the red one has letters going out, and the green one has blank paper for new letters. It’s like a job.”

“Don’t worry blondie. Someday you’ll write the good stuff again.” Her incongruous pep talk made as much sense as anything in Ixcotel. I grabbed at the lifeline she tossed, even though it left me with questions. What is the good stuff? When is ‘again?’

When we were alone, Concha was open and inquisitive. If someone walked by, she would jump in with a smart retort, louder than necessary.

“And that alley was black as the inside of a mean wolf’s mouth! But I got away, easy!”

She wasn’t hiding our friendship from the other women – she greeted me openly, even calling me by name from across the courtyard. What she did hide was this serious side; a side that was seeping out during our talks by the Virgen.

“I was only twenty-two when they caught up with me. I had already pulled off seven armed robberies in Mexico City when it all came down.”

She didn’t start as the leader, but she ended up as one after her big brother moved to “Da Bronz en Nueva Yor.” But that last time in the Banamex, she and her little gang were careless. The take had been effortless and quick. Not like the first times when the young crew was jumpy. After years of practice, this time was perfectly choreographed. So they got cocky and didn’t go straight back to the stash house.

“Cops caught up with us at a taco stand just as I was putting some mean habanero sauce on my tacos. The yellow plastic squeeze bottle was grimy with fingerprints. Funny the things you remember about your last moments of freedom. I had just one bite before they were on me as fast as a skinny dog on garbage. They couldn’t wait to take my greasy fingerprints back at the precinct.”

The police found the take and the stocking masks in the back of the getaway Ford. Too easy. She was in the Penitentiary in Puebla for her first year, where she calloused and quickened.

“You wouldn’t have lasted a day in that miserable dungeon, Mari.” Concha wagged her head at me and smirked. “In Puebla they were really tough. The place was full of crazies, real criminals. My first day in, the boss lady shoved me up against the ringleader so she could watch as we went at it on the floor of the mess hall. The rest of the women threw black beans and eggs at us. Puebla made the women mean… It made all of us mean. I passed boss lady’s test, though. Last time she tried anything with me.”

When she was sentenced to thirteen more years, she was sent back to Oaxaca where her family lived nine long hours away from the prison: one hour walking, two in the back of a pickup truck, and six on the second class bus along the serpentine highway that led up from the coast. They brought her pictures of the cousins and homemade quesillo four times a year, but tried to stay in contact by phone. Concha was a regular in the phone lines, where she waited like everyone else to call her family. Except when she saw someone heading to a phone that happened to be free. Then she would shout “Hey-Hey!! It’s reserved you know!” and nobody came back at her. Concha’s communication to her home town took two calls. After the first call to the public phone in the provisions store in San Mateo de los Bajos, the store attendant would announce the call over a speaker system that was heard throughout the town.

“Call for the Miranda family from Ixcotel State Prison!”

By the time Concha made it back to the front of the line, someone from her family had run to the store to receive her call. The women made it a practice to stay away from Concha after she hung up with her family. Her gloomy gaze advised an ample no-approach zone.

“Were you afraid when you were raiding the banks, Concha? I mean… Twenty-two is young!”

“I was only afraid when the police showed up that last time. I was too excited to be afraid when we were pulling the jobs. It was an adventure. It’s all an adventure. Isn’t it?”

“Were you afraid in Puebla?”

“Nah. Not afraid. Mad. In Puebla, we were all just criminals to the guards. And they treated all of us like the worst of us. Not like here. After that fight we were both sent to solitary lockdown. No chow for a few days. Not like here, Mari. This place is a party.”

“Yeah, a real party.”

“No, Mari. It was different. Trust me. They would have eaten you alive there. You’re a teacher. That pen and notebook? These files?” She tossed my color-coded files aside and they scattered. “They would have sunk their claws right into your soft parts and ripped… you… apart!”

We sat looking into each other’s eyes for a time. She was remembering and I was imagining. She had inadvertently thrown me another lifeline, as I imagined something worse than where I sat at that moment.

“And you, Concha? How did you make it through?”

“Absolutely, positively NO soft parts.”

***

Concha’s new gang inside was her circle of “girls,” outside of which she didn’t seem to have friends or enemies. The women steered clear. Nobody approached as she sat with her girls yowling along to the music every day, except during the talacha when we were required to sweep the entire courtyard. Most of the long-timers who were exempt from sweeping rose and lifted their white plastic stacking chairs so the bits of potato chip and candy wrappers from their lap would be whisked away with the rest of the mementos of a day’s languishing. They remembered what it was like to sweep around the daily activities. Concha wouldn’t move. Sometimes she would put her feet up on another chair and let the women sweep underneath. Or she would empty a coke on the ground in the path of a broom with an “Oops!” and only half-swallow her smirk.

I swept against the wall at the visiting grate during my midday sweep. Men who were allowed roaming privileges congregated outside our courtyard and the women brought taquitos and tortilla soup to them from the kitchen. I swept up cigarette butts, bits of lettuce and bottle caps from between the feet of the women who ignored me as they held hands through the bars with the men outside in the walkway. It made me feel like I was accomplishing something to haul so much away, leaving that section clear for a few minutes after my sweep.

Two fellow talacheras who were fed up with Concha’s antics, thought they saw a way around her that didn’t involve confrontation – for them anyway.

“You go do Concha’s circle today, Gringa. She likes you, doesn’t she? I mean, maybe not like that, but we see you guys talking…”

“Yeah – see if she rips up a gum wrapper just to throw you something, like she does for us. Bet not!”

I rolled my eyes. I wasn’t up for a game, but I knew Concha would prove them wrong. She wouldn’t allow a public exception. And I thought it would be a chance to “blend” more as the women saw that she didn’t treat me any differently. Counting on Concha’s unflinching public lack of cooperation, I moved toward where she sat.

“Hey, Mari!” Concha was sucking on a purple popsicle and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “You got some time this afternoon?”

“I’ll check my schedule and see if I can fit you in, Concha!” I made sure she saw my smile, and I started sweeping around her feet. Then she stood, moved her chair, and picked up a few peanut shells from the ground. The two women watching threw their brooms down with an “I quit” look on their face that would have been comical if anything in Ixcotel could be.

“I gotta go check on my girls. See you this afternoon.” She stuck the peanut shells in the pocket of her jeans.

“Oooh, Gringa! Concha likes you! What’s she want from you, eh?”

Concha was the victor again, leaving us all with a question on our lips.

***

That afternoon when Concha came by, I was writing under the vigilant gaze of the Virgen. Concha kept looking over her shoulder.

“Waiting for someone?”

“No, just wanted to make sure… No, never mind.” She didn’t sit opposite me on the bench this time. She sidled alongside me, close. She smelled like Ivory soap.

“Hey, you ever… You mind if I ask…” She was tugging on the wiry curls at the back of her head.

“What’s up?”

“Listen… Have you… Have you ever been, you know, in love?” She looked at me through wide eyes, with a curiosity that forced furrows into her unlined forehead.

She was serious. Speaking of love in Ixcotel was like eating cotton candy in church. It didn’t mesh with the gray, the smell of the toilets, the petty fights. Still… Concha’s incongruity was compelling.

“Yes, Concha. I’ve been in love. Why?” She looked at me with a question as huge as any I had ever seen brought before the Virgen.

“Well, it’s just… I think… Are you in love, like, now?”

“Yes, I am.”

“I thought so. And does the other person know?”

“Yes, he does.”

“How does he know?” She picked at the splinters of wood on the tabletop, but kept her gaze fixed and anxious.

“I told him.”

“You said ‘I love you’? Weren’t you afraid that he wouldn’t say it back?”

“Well… I guess I just figured… I guess I just knew it was right. Sometimes you just know.” How had I known? A lump started in my throat.

“But how do you just know?”

“Well… I’m really not the authority on these things. I just know… I just knew my own life. I said ‘I love you’ because I felt it from my heart. At the time it didn’t matter if he felt the same thing.”

“Well, does he?”

“Does he what?”

“Does he feel the same thing?”

How could I know anything anymore? After everything I knew to be safe and sure shifted under my feet, how could I trust…?

The molten stars of the plaster Virgin’s cape swirled in front of my eyes, in dizzying mimicry of my thoughts. Just a week before Ixcotel, I had returned from a visit to New York with a big question in my pocket. There was a man there, and for the first time in seventeen years I started to consider my life outside Mexico. Before I left his apartment, I hid messages – “I didn’t expect to love you like this” – written in small, sure script in tiny handmade books made by Russell’s wife. Ever the romantic, Russell had given them to me before I visited New York “just in case” I needed them. I didn’t get a chance to figure any of it out upon return to Mexico. Just a week after my return, love — and most of what I knew outside of the walls of Ixcotel – belonged to that former and distant reality.

“Mari? You okay?” Her voice was low. She touched my hand and I landed.

“Yeah, sure. I’m fine. Sorry. Just thinking again.” Concha’s hand stayed on mine for a moment, and I turned my palm up and lightly held hers. “But, you were saying something? You’ve got a question about love?” Concha shifted in her seat, leaning closer, and withdrew her hand, tucking them both beneath her.

“Yeah. I was wondering if you… maybe if you could help me with this letter for… for a person I know. I’m trying hard but it’s really important. I don’t want to mess up. Will you read it for me, Teach?”

Her three-page letter was draped in the vulnerability of a woman in love. The ocean of differences between us receded, and in the course of the next twenty minutes on that rickety bench by the altar, Concha helped me understand her feelings of love for the recipient of her letter. She stumbled a little, and infused the usual clichés of love with her own brand of tenderness.

“Concha, you put a lot of emotion in here…”

“Yeah, but do you think this person will get it? I never used the word “love” before and it’s a little scary…” Tough Concha cracked open, all buttery soft inside, with a crunch.

“I don’t know if I will lay my head on your shoulder or you will lay your head on mine. I’m the tallest so it’s easier for me. Someday we will be together. Might as well be here.”

I helped her edit her letter down to one page. “That’s it. Yeah.” Concha folded the letter carefully to fit in the back pocket of her jeans. “I have to write it now myself. I’ll give it to her tomorrow. I can’t stand another day without telling her.” She waited for a response from me.

“It’s a good letter, Concha. It’s a brave letter – just like you.”

“Yeah, but what if she doesn’t feel the same thing?”

“You may never know if you don’t try.”

“But…”

“But nothing.” She rose slowly. Her vulnerability settled heavily on her — a tigress with a cupid’s dart stuck in her huge paw. “So how did you make it through Puebla, Concha? I thought you didn’t have any soft parts!” She made a locking sign over her lips, then turned and stalked, squaring her shoulders, back into the jungle.

***

Concha wasn’t sleeping as often in the cacahuate, to the delight of the women who had been assigned spaces on either side of her.

“It’s good to have room again! She took up more than her share.”

“She was going to tell the boss lady I stole her pillow.”

“She’s rolling around with some girl over there in the dormitories. Good luck, I say.”

The women felt relieved, as if a stone were shaken from their shoes.
Concha brought up the letter only once.

“Thanks for the letter, Teach.”

“How’d it go?”

“Not sure yet. But for now it’s good to have someone to ask the big questions with.”

Exactamente, mi Concha.

 
 
 
Mary Ellen Sanger lived for 17 years in Mexico, and has published short stories and poems in Spanish and English in several Mexican journals, including Luna Zeta and Zocalo. Her essay “A Grammar of Place” was anthologized in Mexico, a Love Story, published in 2006 by Seal Press. She was a finalist for the Room of Her Own Foundation “Gift of Freedom” in 2007, and was awarded a writers’ grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund/Money for Women. She is currently writing a collection of stories inspired by the women of Ixcotel State Penitentiary in Oaxaca, Mexico where she spent 33 days and nights falsely imprisoned in the fall of 2003. Mary Ellen leads a creative writing workshop for adults through New York Writers Coalition at the New York Public Library in Inwood and volunteers with PEN American Center as a mentor in the Prison Writing Program.

They have blood lines going back centuries,
Lines crossing in three sections
Across three continents.
No one knows the source of their anger.
No one knows the source of their love.
But if you cross them, man,
Head for the hills,
‘Cause they’ll come after you with kitchen implements:
Frying pans, pots of hot water, knives, rolling pins,
The very same implements they use
To define and express their love for you through
Chuletas, asopao, tostones, arroz y habichelas o pegao,
And in the mornings, quesitos and café con leche.

Watch your step around the women of Arroyo.
They don’t waste time with hexes or potions.
Don’t store your crotch hairs to keep you
Nor enlist spiritualists to get rid of you.
Man, they are self-sufficient.
Don’t go the wrong way on them.
They’ll call you “Papi chulo” as they send you off to bed,
They’ll run their fingers through your hair,
Even close your eye lids for you,
Then, bam! You’ll awake in a fix.

Don’t test the women of Arroyo.
They have a hot gleam in their eye and calculations running in their head.
They know the exact measure of everything, the payback for
An indiscreet fidelity
A hand raised in anger after a night of too much drink
A gambling away of the baby’s milk money
And if you try to beat them on the ledger,
They will swat you like a fly!

Man, don’t mess with those women from Arroyo.
If you’re gonna be a clown, go to San Juan or Ponce,
But do not, do not mess around with the women of Arroyo.
Those sisters don’t play.

 
 
Ken McManus has published poems most recently in Crux: A Conversation in Words and Images (Fulton County Arts Council, GA) and Black Arts Quarterly (Stanford, CA). His chapbook, Americana, was published by Rogue Scholars Press in 2000. In 2001, his poetry was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.