A Poem: Invisible Architecture

a pecha kucha after Richard Serra

[SEA LEVEL]The priests never teach you to lock your fingers inside rather than fold them over when you pray. It is better to let the knuckles form like a crocodile’s knotted brow bone.The skin forming zigzags of brown teeth. Better to let your nails practice what it means to be landlocked.

[INTERVALS]What it means to be a Midwest girl meeting her lover’s mother for the first time in the heart of South America.Nowhere else could a bare-throated bellbird mock me with its blue gullet feathers as though to say, if I had a white body my chin might dribble sapphires too.

[WAKE]Lapacho trees trumpet their pink dresses over brown limbs. I lick my lips—this bruised windpipe to blame for the lack of rolled r’s in Spanish. I would later learn how to roll the dough for chip a. The cassava flour dusting my hands in Easter snow.

[TILTED SPHERES]My lover’s mother sold chip a to men on buses when carrying him in her womb. Her belly swelling like the green hills of Paraguay, hills reminiscent oft he Cahokia Mounds I visited on field trips asa Catholic schoolgirl.[FULCRUM]Gasoline muscles through the air and by midday Asunción places its sticky fingers in every crease of your skin.My sweat glides through the wetlands of a country whose native tongue I have never gleaned like the accent mark slanted back of a waxy monkey frog.

[SHIFT]How do you tell an anteater that you are the descendant of a slave? That you have dreamed of Jesuits riding tapirs to the water’s edge to drink. I once heard a poet say there are people who fear even the trees.

[TORQUE]We visit the stone church his mother wants us to marry in. Men in folding chairs pass mate outside like a holy chalice. Their puckered eyelids reciting, eat my body, drink my blood.

[SLAT]The fourteen Stations of the Cross all perfectly drawn from memory on my thighs, the paint brush of my lover’s tongue now drying in the sun. His open mouth the bell rung before mass. Confession a peep hole in the wooden outhouse door.[AXIS]In Paraguayan folklore there are seven monsters.The Guarani say Kurupi comes at nightHis penis wound several times tight around his waist , a belted vestment of sorts.[SEQUENCE]His reach extending through the windows.A scapegoat for how a woman could come to be with child. How an 11-year-oldgives birth after rape.

[EVERY WHICH WAY]A jaguar whips its cat-o’-nine-tails —a symbol of self-flagellation, its spotted back stained with welts, sins branded deep in a golden coat. Whiskers glistening with beer and spit.[THROUGH]There is a place where scent and sound merge, where I can smell the word for mother from the kitchen. The parts of her body an ecosystem. A crucifix shaped pipeline come again.[HOUSE OF CARDS]My lover wants to buy his mother a house, before the diabetes settles in the shanty towns of her arteries, before her small clay body rattles with every breath. But even in perhaps the final hour there are names some mothers won’t provide.[SILENCE]I am with my lover in his homeland to find the man blood says is his father. In the picture the man dresses as gaucho.In another life he and my lover would have ridden horseback, eaten ox meat by the fire, trading stories, stevia root melting sweetly into their tongues.[JUNCTION]In his mother’s house, the shadow of my lover’s father scrapes itself across the floor just as the wiry old broom sweeps bits of dirt together under cover of a dustpan black as night. A child can never really know their father anyway, never know his face by heart.

[OPEN ENDED]I could never trust what the blood said was mine, how the blood sung a song of myself.Most people are really just other people.There are three bones in the human ear, one broken from the voices it doesn’t recognize as its own.

[CYCLE]They say a man must know his father to raise a son.But expectation and disappointment are second cousins, first removed on both our daddy’s sides.Kierkegaard says to name is to negate and yet we blindly name the living after those gone ghost.

[THREE UNEQUAL ELEVATIONS]I watch my lover stare at the photo of his father.His wanting eyes scanning his mother’s praying hands, traveling every crooked vein in search of his namesake.Will our child grow up chasing origin by its wiry tail?What fearful family tree will it find to climb?

[INSIDE OUT]We could have ended up with any number of different lives, an infinity of possible configurations and so we pick apart the parts of speech until the day that we are pronounced dead. The language has that funny way about it, like air sticking to the teeth in a hiss.[RIGHT ANGLE PLUS ONE]My mother is indigenous to nowhere. My lips curl in blood at the rising of the father. Black is not a primary color.A brown woman can still get killed for saying no. A domain name set to expire. When remote the connections get lost.How did hips learn to sound out a child? 

This piece was originally published in The Offing. Alison C. Rollins, born and raised in St. Louis city, currently works as the Librarian for Nerinx Hall. She is the second prizewinner of the 2016 James H. Nash Poetry contest and a finalist for the 2016 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Meridian, Missouri Review, The Offing, Poetry, The Poetry Review, River Styx, Solstice, TriQuarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, Vinyl, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem as well as Callaloo Fellow, she is also a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship.