David Meischen's Blog, page 3

Number Magic: Three

Here’s a poem for you:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  At Zero Hour  the bullring is halved   into sunlight, shadow.   In the darkness   of the tunnel,   a matador arches his back   in a suit of lights.   A bull rakes the dirt   with his black, cloven hooves.   On the lips of bottles of cerveza,   the flies, urgent with the smell   of death, lift their frenzied,   rubbing hands to the sun.    ~ Larry D. Thomas

I love tercets, love the magic inside the number three—the unity of three in one, as in the Christian trinity; the perfect symmetry of an equilateral triangle; the imbalance in love triangles through the ages. Anna-Karenin-Vronsky, Hester-Chillingworth-Dimmesdale.

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Consider this little poem by my friend Larry Thomas. Notice how each stanza provides a quick glimpse, a focus . . . and then spills into the next stanza, like a slinky walking down a set of stairs.

Bullring, matador, bull—a tercet for each. But not quite. The third stanza gives two lines to the bull—in perfect focus. And then a surprise, a turn. From the dryness of dirt on raking hooves to the liquid sensations evoked by “lips of bottles of cerveza.”

And then, the final surprise: flies on the rims of the beer bottles, flies smelling death in the bull ring, flies “frenzied” over the smell of blood.

Note:

2008 Texas Poet Laureate Larry D. Thomas is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Author of several poetry collections, Larry has received several honors, including two Texas Review Poetry Prizes (2001 and 2004), the 2003 and 2015 Western Heritage Awards (National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum), and the 2004 Violet Crown Book Award (Writers’ League of Texas).

“At Zero Hour” is available in Letting the Light Work, a new chapbook from Buttonhook Press. Available here ⇒

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Mockingbird, Tomcat, Squirrel

In the fall of 2006 (if memory serves), I had the unbelievable good fortune of a semester-long writing workshop with Tim O’Brien. At some point, O’Brien assigned Irwin Shaw’s “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” a seven-page story, mostly dialogue, during which a marriage is shaken. When I arrived at Shaw’s closing line, I thought immediately of “Say Yes” by Tobias Wolff, a four-page story, also mostly dialogue, also revealing a fissured marriage. I’ve written about both stories here—but not about how they affected my own writing.

Which is to say: I went to work on a man-and-wife story, a dialogue story, during which one of the parties says the one wrong word that cannot be taken back. “In the Garden” surprised me more than once, mostly as regards setting—the yard and garden of a household on the bluff above Austin’s Shoal Creek, September 1982. I wanted setting to anchor my story, so I began with birdsong: “The mockingbird trilled again, like an answer to the silverware Blake had dropped on the garden table. The bird sang out and paused, sang out and paused again. It was lovely in the garden—a hint of cool in September’s air, the afterburn of Connie buzzing in Blake’s blood.” I knew that Blake was gay and mostly in denial, gay and euphoric because his sex life with Connie had rekindled. I knew their breakfast conversation would badly destabilize them. I wanted their backyard environs to be as alive as the two breakfasting there.

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In the story’s second paragraph, a breeze snaps the umbrella over the breakfast table, Blake glances to the Austin skyline, and then—my first surprise—“Buster padded out of the yaupon hollies at the garden’s edge—a regal tomcat whorled in tawny gold and amber.” Buster, it occurred to me right away, was Connie’s cat, an un-neutered somewhat undaunted male. By the time Connie arrives for breakfast, Blake has a scratched forearm that triggers a friendly tiff between husband and wife. During which—my second surprise—Buster freezes in a hunter’s crouch while a squirrel chatters among Connie’s tomato vines. The mockingbird mimics the squirrel—my third surprise—and then I could see the story’s snapping point.

A roofer arrives to patch the roof. And complicate the story—nothing better than a third person to destabilize a situation. “Pretty as a pin-up,” Connie says—and turns the conversation to Blake’s history of staring at attractive men. One ill-considered remark after another, the conversation spirals out of control, Connie goading, Blake defensive, then adamant, then saying the one thing this marriage cannot hold.

Connie slumps on the lawn, deflated. Blake stands helpless as the roofer approaches. At this juncture the story wants—the story demands—something to express the tension.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  The moment arrived in a blaze of sunlight—the little squirrel yammering   from his perch among the tomatoes, the mockingbird dive-bombing like   a songbird turned hawk. Blake turned to a split-second blur of gold. Buster   swiped the mockingbird out of the air, leaped and snatched the stunned   creature in his teeth by the wing. Blake took one quick step. He delivered   a kick that sent Buster sprawling and knocked the bird flapping into the dirt.   Buster spun back in full hunting mode. Blake grabbed the tom and flung   him in Connie’s direction. She held on to her cat. The mockingbird fluttered   and flopped in a morning suddenly so still Blake could hear the whirring   of tires across the creek on Lamar Boulevard.

This moment pleases me because the sudden, unexpected violence, the triple surprise of mockingbird, squirrel, and tomcat intersecting, expresses the tamped down emotional violence Blake and Connie have ignited.

Look around, O’Brien said to us more than once. Discover what’s in the space with your characters? Use it. To which I might add: find surprise there.

Note:

Superstition Review published “In the Garden,” Spring 2011. Earlier this year, abruptly, Arizona State University cancelled the journal and shut down the website. I’ve posted the story on my website ⇒

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The I Forged

“meanwhile, dust devils” by Albuquerque poet Kristian Macaron is a very narrow poem arranged in three columns on one page of her short collection, intriguingly titled Recipe for Time Travel in Case We Lose Each Other. “meanwhile, dust devils” places poet and reader on the volcanic escarpment that flowed from the Three Sisters, fissure volcanoes just west of the city.

Macaron opens with “the first thing / to grow back . . . soft green / moss” that doesn’t cover “the roughed scars / the forging left.” I love the choice of forging, subtly introducing the personified force that myth credits with the rock-liquefying heat of volcanoes. Having mentioned scars, the poem moves smoothly to the body:

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  but skin  is skin  and underneath  this scorched  skeleton  I am still warmer  than other parts  of the world—

We’ve entered the poem through fourteen lines of anonymous image—placing us on a lava flow that has cooled enough to accommodate moss on the surface. And now the I appears—volcano personified, magma personified. But so much more. This I has been forged. This I is mythic.

The poem continues in the voice of the volcano to a breaking point:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  every part  of me is      fractal—

A vertical space break and then this:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  meanwhile, I  am still writing  love letters about  time travel  and pulsars  learning the shapes  of earthquakes  and ferns . . .

Effortlessly, the voice of the poem transfigures—from the I of the volcano to the I of the poet, from mythic I to personal I. Then, smooth as can be—“the prairie swarms me”—the voice transmutes again. And we’re back in the voice of the cooled lava flow.

Each time now, when the first-person pronoun repeats, I hear two voices in one. The poet speaks as lava flow; the lava flow speaks as poet.

“meanwhile, dust devils” is just the right, the evocative, title. I picture Kristian Macaron standing out on the West Mesa, a whirlwind spinning along the fissure scar as she muses over the tectonic history beneath her and then, given the power of metaphor, becomes one with the mythic power of the earth’s forge.

Note:

Co-founding editor of the literary journal, Manzano Mountain Review, Kristian Macaron lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her writing, inspired by this colorful landscape, explores tales that derive from connections to her Hispanic/Latinx and Lebanese-American heritage, but also her love for cryptids, portals, geology, and time travel. She has an MFA in Creative Writing, Fiction, from Emerson College.

Recipe for Time Travel in Case We Lose Each Other is available here ⇒

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First Person, Interruptive

“The invisible mists were falling, fine as pollen, and soon everyone would sleep.”

Thus opens Sleepaway, poet Kevin Prufer’s debut novel, published earlier this year. Set in 1984, with the dystopian intimation Orwell breathed into that calendar number, Sleepaway is—yes—a kind of dystopia, quietly disturbing, a coming-of-age story as only a gifted poet could bring to the page.

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A pandemic of sorts has arrived—the mists of Prufer’s opening sentence—erratic, haphazard clouds that wrap all inside them in sleep. Most wake when the mists pass; some do not. Our protagonist is a boy called Glass, whose father has succumbed to indefinite sleep.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Glass had once been a normal boy who spent an abnormal  amount of time sitting in the middle school hallway because  he could not hold still. He just couldn’t. Every inch of his  body craved movement when he was at school.

This boy inhabits the realm of the best adolescent fiction, smoothly written, with much going on beneath the surface. Living with a “temporary father,” Glass negotiates school days and time with two friends, parsing what he can about the mysterious sleeps from overheard conversations among the adults in his life.

Most sleepers wake to report complete, dreamless cessation. Not Glass. His sleeps are vivid with dreams. Eleven pages in, Prufer reports on one such dream, the scene so vividly depicted I forgot Glass was dreaming:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  . . . a desolate town, an overgrown little park near the town hall,  the sky streaked with gray, a late-afternoon light, a feeling of May  in the air. It threatened to rain but it would not, and Glass and  Glass’s father and perhaps a hundred others were settling into  folding chairs spread out on the grass, because the show was  about to begin.

And then this:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  I was there with them, sitting just a row behind Glass and his  father, and when Glass glanced at me, I quickly looked down  at my program.

The first-person I here stops my reading cold. What is the narrator—Kevin Prufer, I assume—doing inside the novel, inside a scene in Glass’ life? Then I backtrack a paragraph and . . . I laugh. The author-narrator has just appeared in his protagonist’s dream!

I had no idea what Prufer was up to here. But I admire an author who bends the rules, who writes the unexpected, who breaks the fourth wall, speaking from the pages of fiction. I thought surely the I would appear again, and I was not disappointed. It’s a rare appearance, not often enough to break the spell of the narrative. But periodically the I speaks again—tickling an observant reader’s curiosity.

I don’t want to spoil this surprise by telling you why I think Prufer inserts himself into a fictional narrative that doesn’t include him as a character (or does it?). I do want to encourage you to read Sleepaway. And to make yourself ready for surprise, no matter what you choose to read

Notes:

Recipient of five Pushcart prizes and several Best American Poetry selections, Kevin Prufer is the author of several poetry collections, most recently The Fears.

Sleepaway is available here ⇒

The Fears—highly recommended—is available here ⇒

PSA: Please purchase your books from independent bookstores or small presses or online entities such as bookshop.org. Avoid the Big-A, which is in the business of putting independent bookstores and small presses out of business.

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The Poem Embodied

In 2020, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, a year from the end of its three-decade run, chose Octavio Quintanilla as the Featured Poet for issue 52. I have not forgotten the surprise I felt discovering Quintanilla’s poetry—nor the pleasure I take these days, re-reading poems from his new collection, The Book of Wounded Sparrows, issued earlier this year by Texas Review Press.

Over and over when I read Quintanilla, it is the image that arrests me, the image that surprises, the image my eye goes back to when one of his poems arrives at the last word. “Nostalgia,” for example, a poem in five brief glimpses, spaced apart and buffered by asterisks.

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Here’s the second section:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  I follow the plow’s pull, slitting  the earth in two.  A voice with two sparrows  for a throat  calls me.  I think it’s my father’s.

The plow here is a metaphor for nostalgia, drawing narrator and reader, unable to resist. And then—“a voice with two sparrows for a throat”—I feel the ache in my adam’s apple, stronger with the pull of memory, with the thought that the voice is “my father’s.”

This poem’s closing glimpse is one simple line:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Tonight, nostalgia is a lit candle in my chest.

Here again, Quintanilla locates the poem’s central emotion: in the physicality of the self. Nostalgia surprises when it enters, splitting the recipient open like a plow, vibrating in the throat like sparrow song, illuminating from within like candle fire.

Another of the poems in The Book of Wounded Sparrows moves smoothly from couplet to couplet, opening simply:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  You take a picture of your father  with your new cell phone

No surprise here—except in the poem’s unrippled forward movement. To a moment when son faces father, hoping for “anything that doesn’t require // words, a doorknob perhaps / that opens the sky before you.”

From the ordinary moment of taking a cell phone photo to the simple physicality of opening a door . . . to the surprise that awaits when the poem takes a reader’s breath away.

Notes:

2018-2020 Poet Laureate of San Antonio, Texas, Octavio Quintanilla is a prolific poet, artist, poet-artist. His frontextos are striking works of art—stunningly colorful paintings that incorporate text. The word frontexto is Quintanilla’s coinage, combining frontera and texto—border/text.

Check out his website ⇒

The Book of Wounded Sparrows was longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award. It is abailable here ⇒

PSA: Please purchase your books from bookstores or independent presses or from online entities such as bookshop.org. Avoid the Big-A, which is in the business of putting bookstores and small presses out of business.

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Sidelong Glance

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published“You ever notice no one gets diarrhea on the Hallmark Channel?” Boner said into the awkward silence of the bus.

Crudeness notwithstanding, this little paragraph is the perfect opening to “Once Upon a Time in New Haven,” a masterful short story by Paul Juhasz. For starters, the boy’s name, an indication—paired with the speaker’s excrement fixation—that we are entering the realm of the adolescent male, where a nickname can brand someone as both a dick and a bonehead. Boner is both. In one of the story’s wryly humorous moments, we learn that his given name is Bonaparte.

He and two peers are taking advantage of a day off from school by heading into downtown New Haven, first stop Libby’s, a sweets shop rife with Italian goodies. Here they encounter an infamous mafioso—pomaded black hair, sinister carriage, handgun bulging beneath his suit jacket. Boner’s friends understand the threat inherent in the man’s name; Boner does not, his cluelessness on stark display later in the story, when he identifies the mafioso to a policeman investigating a murder.

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By now, we know these boys. Boner is a goofball, a hanger-on, serving as punching bag for Jaxson, angry son of an alcoholic father and a mother who split. Gill is middle class, with an intact family. He’s shrewder than both his companions, but he won’t be able to guide them through the dangers that await. Painful disappointments will clearly shape all three as they negotiate adolescence. This jewel of a story could easily close with Boner’s fateful—possibly fatal—mistake of naming the dangerous man.

But Juhasz knows these boys better than we do. He knows New Haven, knows their day has only begun. Shortly thereafter, the boys pass Wooster Park:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published. . . man-creatures slept under benches, enfolded within layers of discarded jackets and frayed blankets, their soiled coats the corpses of the free market, the promise of capitalism lined inside lint-frayed pockets, cardboard beds slowing the seepage of wet earth and insect horde. They will arise in the dark, scouring through the leavings, fostered by detritus, scrap-nourished, but for now, they sleep . . .

This vividly detailed scene widens the context—for Boner and his companions, for us. But Juhasz has a surprise in store:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published. . . amongst them walks a man, bone thin and pale, his eyes hidden under the brim on an anachronistic top hat, feeding on this atmosphere of despair. He has been to Libby’s already; has whispered . . . in an ear beneath pomaded hair the black of the universe. . . . In due time, he will be elsewhere. In due time, he will be everywhere. He whistles. . . . And he is once again, as always, prowling, interminable.

Each time I read this story, I pause here, realizing that the grim reaper has strolled into an actual park in an actual American city. “Once Upon a Time in New Haven” is not about men without homes who spend their days in Wooster Park, but these dispossessed are part of the urban fabric experienced by Boner, Jaxson, and Gill during their day out of school. And already, they have brushed elbows with the grim reaper.

Twice more, Juhasz enriches the story with sidelong glances, once to include a destitute blind man who functions as a seer for the boys. And again, to include a prostitute tasked with her client to lure one of the boys into his grasp. You’ll want to know what happens. Get this collection into your hands: As If Place Matters. Let Juhasz’s stories shake you up.

Note:

As If Place Matters is available here ⇒

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Conversational Surprise

Benjamin Myers draws me into a poem with ordinary words of ordinary people . . . leading to moments of quiet insight that keep me turning pages forward. And turning pages back to re-read favorites. “Grown-Ass Man,” from The Family Book of Martyrs, is one of those.

For starters: the title. I hear this title—the voice, the inflection, the vernacular irony. Can’t help myself, I grin. I want to read a poem that calls itself “Grown-Ass Man.”

Myers opens with the image of a tractor mower on “the empty lot across the street at 5:30 / on a summer Monday morning.” In five effortless stanzas of four lines each, he listens to the mower, “the pings of rock // bouncing up against the metal deck.” He remembers the derelict house that once occupied the lot, recalling that “for three months an abandoned baby / doll with one missing eye sat / on the roof outside the attic window.” This singular detail lands me on the porch with Myers.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedNow, stirred from tall grass by the mower,a white dog noses an empty can of energydrink by the curb, lifts its leg and lowersit again without pissing. I am 39 this week.

I love the surprise here—I am 39 this week—love that nowhere in the nineteen preceding lines does the poem suggest awareness of or anxiety about aging. But sudden awareness is just that: sudden. Sometimes it arrives without embellishment. The number alone suffices here. 39. We need not be told that’s one year shy of 40.

Myers turns then, from details of these minutes on his porch to facts about himself on the cusp of 39. He is “learning to walk slowly beside / my small son . . . learning to walk / slowly beside my mother into the cancer clinic.”

Then, in a perfect bit of serendipity, Myers overhears a gruff neighbor arguing with his wife, insisting, I am a grown-ass man. The man repeats his claim. And Myers closes out: “I repeat it too, quietly, /  liking the sound of it.”

Page after page, in The Family Book of Martyrs, Benjamin Myers surprises—with subtle moments, gentle epiphanies such as this one. I keep my copy near at hand. These days more than ever, we need this kind of poetry.

Notes:

Thanks to the poet, I can share this poem here. See below.

A former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma, Benjamin Myers is the author of four poetry collections. He is a professor of literature at Oklahoma Baptist University, where he directs the Great Books Honors Program.

The Family Book of Martyrs is available here ⇒

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedGrown-Ass ManA man backs a tractor slowly down metal rampsbehind a flatbed truck and begins to mowthe empty lot across the street at 5:30on a summer Monday morning.I am standing on the front porch drinking coffeebefore I drive my mother to chemo. I watchthe tractor drag its large, flat moweraround the lot, listen to the pings of rockbouncing up against the metal deck.Last fall, they tore down the housethat used to be there, its peeling roof patchedonly by leaves fallen from one large oak.There were stacks of car batteries by the front door,and for three months an abandoned babydoll with one missing eye saton the roof outside the attic window.Now, stirred from tall grass by the mower,a white dog noses an empty can of energydrink by the curb, lifts its leg and lowersit again without pissing. I am 39 this week.I am learning to walk slowly besidemy small son when we go to the librarydown the street. I am learning to walkslowly beside my mother into the cancer clinic.As the mower powers down, I hearmy neighbor’s voice suddenly loudin argument with his wife. I ama grown-ass man, he is yelling.I am a grown-ass man, he repeats,and I repeat it too, quietly,liking the sound of it.Benjamin MyersThe Family Book of Martyrs (Lamar University Literary Press, 2022)

Fault Line

It’s a lovely Irwin Shaw Sunday morning in New York City. “Michael held Frances’ arm. . . . They walked lightly, almost smiling, because they had slept late and had a good breakfast.” Michael almost falls as they walk. His wife’s response lets us know why this story is titled “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.”

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published    “She’s not so pretty anyway,” Frances said. “Anyway, not pretty enough     to take a chance breaking your neck looking at her.”

Congenial husband and wife banter spills from the page as they walk on, no hint of tension. Until Frances breaks off mid-sentence:

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published     “Say, are you listening to me?”     “Sure,” he said. He took his eyes off the hatless girl with the dark hair,     cut dancer-style, like a helmet, who was walking past him with the self-    conscious strength and grace dancers have. She was walking without a     coat and she looked very solid and her belly was flat, like a boy’s, under     her skirt, and her hips swung boldly because she was a dancer and also     because she knew Michael was looking at her. . . . Michael noticed all these     things before he looked back at his wife.

And clearly Frances has been noticing her husband noticing.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published    “You always look at other women,” Frances said. “At every damn woman     in the City of New York.”

As the conversation continues, the words border on bickering. Michael tries to defend himself:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published    “I look at women,” he said. “Correct. I don’t say it’s wrong or right, I     look at them. . . .”    “You look at them as through you want them . . . Every one of them.”

Minutes later, after rhapsodizing about all the attractive women in the city, Michael admits, “I can’t help but look at them. I can’t help but want them.” And shortly after: “Sometimes I feel I would like to be free.”

What has been said here reveals not necessarily the end of Michael and Frances—but a fault line that threatens their marriage. In the space of a few minutes, a woman surprises her husband by saying what she has noticed. A husband surprises his wife by verifying what she fears. Readers are surprised by seeing—perhaps for the umpteenth time—the disrupting power words can have in what begins as a congenial conversation between two people who take their relationship for granted.

I’ve written about this kind of story, this kind of moment before, when an ordinary conversation trips over a word, an admission, that can’t be taken back. I call these Hurstwood moments, after the character in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie who is on the verge of returning $10,000 in cash that is not his to the safe where it belongs . . . when the safe door clicks shut.

Frances might have dropped the subject, but she didn’t. Michael might have safely returned the currency of his marriage to a safe place, but he didn’t. Shaw might have penned a definitive verdict on this relationship, but a good story—like a previously okay marriage—doesn’t work that way.

Note:

“The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” is available in Short Stories: Five Decades (University of Chicago Press, 2000). I found it online at Classic Short Stories.

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Dumbass Decisions

“The next afternoon, near the outskirts of El Paso, he was downing his last beer.” Our man here is a serially irresponsible truck driver named Donnie, one of several characters defined by thoughtless choices and worse luck in It Falls Gently All Around, linked short stories by Ramona Reeves.

Donnie has been locked out of his apartment for failing to pay the rent. His father has died. His wife has left him, and he’s fallen for the delusion that he can change, that surely he’ll win her back. Still, driving a load from Mobile, Alabama, to the West Coast could be the first step toward at least minimal financial solvency, and the drive might go smoothly, despite Donnie’s decision “to drink on markers divisible by fifty.” But then this:

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“A billboard advertised Psychic Readings by Sylvia and boasted Get Answers Now. He’d driven past the billboard hundreds of times, but the double weight of losing his father and his wife had him feeling like the heavy end of a pickax. Sylvia’s answers couldn’t be worse than his own.” Even a somewhat clueless reader will chuckle here, knowing that a freeway psychic along the outskirts of any American city is not likely to offer actual rescue.

But Ramona Reeves knows this character. She lets him make the foolish move, the predictable but surprising move—the mistake that keeps on giving. Donnie leaves the freeway, his exit a fork for driver and story. His life unravels as the story comes into its own, engaging us in a sad but comic misadventure to a dead end for Donnie.

“The GPS led him onto a tar-and-chip road littered with rocks and potholes” to a derelict house that looks abandoned, where he draws the death card from a tarot deck, then drinks from a bottle of beer after watching as the psychic “emptied a capsule into the bottle.” I love this moment in the story. It’s a hinge moment, when a character does something both appallingly foolish and—given what deft storytelling has revealed about him so far—absolutely credible.

These are among the moments that make fiction worth the bother for this reader, when I witness a character make absolutely the wrong mistake, the foolish mistake, the patently avoidable mistake—the mistake that reveals him to me.

It Falls Gently All Around has an ensemble cast that deserves an award of some kind—characters who stumble over their own worst impulses, then get up and try again. Their missteps surprise as their stories engage. I’ll be reading this collection again.

Note:

Ramona Reeves won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for It Falls Gently All Around (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022).

Available at University of Pittsburgh Press ⇒

Check out Ramona’s website ⇒

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At Home in This World

flesh to bone, ire’ne lara silva’s 2013 story collection, opens with “hunger/hambre/mayantli”—the title word in English, Spanish, and Nahuatl.The story proceeds in short sections, each focusing on one of four characters—brother and sister Luis and Luisa, their mother Bertha, and a ghost-boy named Adrian who wanders a cemetery near his unmarked grave. ire’ne lara silva navigates a fictional territory known as magical realism, but she and her characters are so much at home in this world that readers enter—and stay—without needing a label for where they are.

We meet Luisa in the story’s short second section—three paragraphs that immerse us in this girl’s relationship with words. What surprises—and enchants me here—is that nothing happens. Except enchantment. Enter it with me:

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“sollozo sollozar llorar olvidar recordar recuerdo iluminar luminiscencia luminosidad reflección espejo cara  retrato pintura luz. She embroidered her day with words, words like rays of light, words like flowers and butterflies and bird wings. She didn’t need music, just words. Words pulled from the sky, the light, the walls, the people she saw in the street or at school. Words lived under and on and in everything. She caught them, hiding them in her mouth. She tasted them, testing their shape with her tongue, her teeth, the roof of her mouth. Sometimes she held them in her hands. She liked to hollow them out, pressing with her thumbs, scratching with her nails. The faintest scratch and entire sounds would fall away. She liked the unknown shapes in words. Liked to open them to the eye. Liked words that sparked with one meaning when they were held up to the light and another meaning when she took them to the shadows. A tree that was a cloud that was a silver fin that was a drop of water that was the aching curve of the moon.”

My Spanish is less than rudimentary, but speak the first five words with me: sollozo sollozar llorar olvidar recordar. Hear the music in the weaving of repeated sounds—the sibilance of s, the yummy feeling of double l, the rounded mouth of o, the widemouth wonder of ar. Notice that the first verb in silva’s actual narrative is embroidered. We observe Luisa as she engages with words, but the embroidery here, the tactility, the harmonies—these are the author’s. The word words—plural—enters the stitchery eight times. The varied rhythms are mesmeric. “words like flowers and butterflies and bird wings. . . . Words pulled from the sky, the light, the walls.” Notice the iambic pulse of the sky, the light, the walls. Years ago, I heard iambic pentameter defined as “the rhythm of the human heartbeat.” Yes! My heart beats with Luisa here.

To an observer other than the author, this girl might easily appear to be static, immobile—doing nothing, going nowhere. But the verbs say otherwise: pulled, lived, caught, hiding, tasted, testing, held, hollow, pressing, scratching, fall, sparked, held, took. These verbs are weaving a story, transforming Luisa into someone profoundly engaged with her private world. That’s the gift of writers such as ire’ne lara silva. They take us deep into a world of surprise.

My Question for You, Dear Reader/Writer:

Name a story, a novel, a collection of poems with language that casts a spell, that mesmerizes you, that wants to be read aloud. Extra challenge: identify a single paragraph / stanza with this kind of language. I’ll go first: the opening paragraph of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.

Notes:

ire’ne lara silva, 2023 Texas State Poet Laureate, is a force of nature. She’s the author of five poetry collections, two chapbooks, a comic book, and flesh to bone, a short story collection, winner of the Premio Aztlán. I’ve had a bit of a preview of irene’s second story collection—can’t wait: the light of your body (Arte Publico, Spring 2025).

Visit the author’s website.

flesh to bone is available here.

At Amazon as well. But to the extent possible, purchase your books from independent bookstores, small presses, university presses, and authors themselves. Keep this publishing territory alive.

Thanks for reading Narrative Surprise! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.