Brent Ameneyro, A Face Out of Clay: Poems

 

ODYSSEUS AS A MEXICAN BOY

the Cyclops sometimesappears as an angry school principal
who yells at the boy inSpanish
until a large vein splitshis forehead

into two hemispheres
and his dark brown skin

becomes the earth
the boy sails away untilhe finds a new land
with bright green grass

which is actuallyartificial turf for a soccer field
he comes across Poseidon
who is a goalie
that punches the ballwith a closed fist

Penelope is a blondesecond grader back in California
Calypso is a Mexican girlwho teaches a boy to dance

Iwas curious to see the full-length debut by Los Angeles poet and editor Brent Ameneyro, following the chapbook Puebla (Ghost City Press, 2023), A Face Out of Clay: Poems (Fort Collins CO: The Center for LiteraryPublishing, 2024). A Face Out of Clay is a collection of first-personlyrics that explores context as well as form, attempting to define the self,especially between the seeming-poles of two distinct cultural considerations,between Mexican and American, overlaying other literary considerations acrosshis own narratives, from Greek Odysseus to Ulysses. As he writes to openthe poem “ULYSSES IN PUEBLA”: “He cleans his lips with two wipes / of his JorgeCampos jersey. / Damn that new kid in school. / Damn him. Hope he trips / andcan’t play for a few weeks.” Across these poems, Ameneyro is first and foremosta storyteller, examining the American experience through the lens of his ownMexican background, providing echoes similar to that of Mexican American poet,editor and teacher Jose Hernandez Diaz’s recent full-length debut, BadMexican, Bad American (Cincinnati OH: Acre Books, 2024) [see my review of such here]. Ameneyro might utilize that initial and simultaneous dualconnection and disconnect as a kind of foundation for the collection as whole, hequickly furthers his reach by offering perspectives and insights into examples fromthe larger, surrounding population, each of whom are looking for some human wayto connect. “Nobody stopped to ask / if you are lonely // on the long drivehome. / You are so calm,” he writes, to open the poem “TO THE GUY WHO DRESSED AMANNEQUIN AND PROPPED IT UP IN / THE PASSENGER SEAT TO USE THE CARPOOL LANE,” “sostill // as you look beyond everyone, / past the illusion of daylight; it’shard to tell // where the black of your eye ends / and the infinite black ofthe universe // begins. Who sat there before?” In a very fine collection, debutor otherwise, Ameneyro displays himself as a narrative collage-artist,attending elements from all directions while holding still to that relativelystraightforward through-line, which allows any lyric and drift to remainpurposeful, propulsive. “Hidden above the ash / in the sky,” he writes, as partof “ULYSSES IN PUEBLA,” “a red-legged honeycreeper wanders / the empty space.”