one more from Griselda J Castillo

In my recent microreview & interview of Griselda J Castillo’s Blood & Piloncillo (Poxo Publication), I wrote about Castillo’s collection in terms of its rich and complicated relationship with praise as well as its distinct take on ideas of attention and reckoning. All of these elements can be found in this week’s poem, “Trade,” from the same collection.

In this poem, Castillo’s singular approach to the poetic line is applied to cultural critique. The poem presents the meditations of a Mexican-American speaker thinking of Mexico while living in New Mexico. The speaker’s narrative guides the reader through the echo and change beyond the place names, and delves into the differences between those two places as well as the difference between memory and present reality.

[image error]What happens as these intersections are explored is critique via the performance of language. Castillo’s poetic sensibility invites the reader to play close attention not just to line breaks but to choices in capitalization and idiom. The way, for example, in which “Mexico” is capitalized in the third stanza, where as “american” is not in the second stanza, provides a visual cue of what the speaker is wrestling with. However, it is not a simple gesture of dismissal, but rather a nuanced reaching into memory. One gets the impression that for the speaker this “new” Mexico feels “watered-down,” and that the only way to push against this feeling is to emphasize memory in whatever way one can, in this case via typography.

The use of Spanish in this poem is also performing emphasis. The few Spanish words that appear in this poem do so without calling attention to themselves with italics or translation. This move in Latinx poetry always feels like a necessary one, a gesture of saying something in the only way it can be said, and trusting the reader to take out their phone and consult Google translate if necessary. But more than translation, what Spanish is performing in this poem is presence. Among the English of the majority of the poem, the Spanish words foreshadow the “poor cutting” at the end of the poem, transplanted words that reflect the transplanted speaker. Indeed, the way “poor cutting” brings together both subject and the speaker’s feelings is a an example of Castillo’s accomplished and engaged lyricism.

Trade – Griselda J Castillo

my tacos get cold

and homesick

outside the burrito place

beneath red and yellow umbrellas

someone’s tin foil american flag

flaps against an old cottonwood

bullied by the winter wind

rushing the gray day along

in Mexico it’d be a hot

october day frying under the sun

in its delicious way

caressed by street chatter

from vendors and cockfights

in the alley

papel picado frames a world seen

from under my father’s mustache

my hands swallowed

in his never-ending palms

as he lifts me onto

a carousel of hot afternoons

warm rains

fertile earth birthing

green hackberry leaves

mango trees sigh through an eternal

summer of mom cotorreando

watering temperamental bougainvillea

and exuberant hibiscus

her cooing echoes are the memory

of our backyard

but this is new mexico

where an arid adaptation smothers me

in unfamiliar chiles

where snowy dry roasted mornings

are so cold even yucca and piñon

hunker down

thorns muffled under a cream blanket

I pour watered-down horchata

around dismal flip-flops

throw limp tacos at

a weathered potted plant

and think

poor cutting

never considered

what it would endure

embedded in foreign sand

*

Copies of Blood & Piloncillo can be purchased directly from the author at: griseldajcastillo@gmail.com