“The blood of my ancestors / called me with a pistol / at the hand of my father / whispering goodbye.”
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Architect: Kidneys with Lupus
I drive a big yellow taxi. A fast car. An evil beauty of piss color and sunflower bloom. I confess I am a waiting room. A halfway house. A floating blood bank off the East Andes. I am radioactive. I am the “be still.” The science, the flicker jubilee and haze of Chernobyl. I am the lighthouse storm, the elastic shelter. The little light fetish of sparrow constellations.
The History of My Father’s Pain
“we all knew.”
the clock man of the island
was an SS officer
the cries of Himmler gripped in the hand
of God
turning counter clockwise
blood careening in gravity
body suspended upside down
tolling
safe in Bayamon
the clock man,
the minute hand,
repairing my grandmother’s clock
flamboyan trees,
blooms of blood suns,
touching the tight lipped
shutters of the window
sounding
sounding the grandfather
clock
tolling
tolling the moon above the cabin
of grandmother’s clock
licking
the lingua of the pendula
of God.
“Todos sabimos.”
🔾
“The sound was old and beautiful”
I sometimes wonder if we pay for our secrets,
my grandmother’s father hidden in a wall
during a reaping, his brother walked to a cliff
by nationalists
I spit tomato vines thru a parting
in the kitchen shutters,
my grandmother, my mamá,
tasting the escabeche with a wooden spoon
lips rouged
the clock tolls once for every hour
the shoreline breaks with a body
along Castillo del Morro
the clock tolls eleven times
and each time she meditates
on the dismemberment by the
minute man to find the silenced
toll.
“El sonido era antiguo y bella.”
🔾
“No, he was a very nice
and secluded man with
his windows closed
with little light coming in.”
My father and grandfather knocked on the cabin door,
scalloped feet and head shouldered,
the tongue of gold silenced
my mamá had told them
tHe mInuTe MAN answered and led them thru,
father wandered from grandfather
clock
a door open
hidden
a watch
man on the wall
weightless,
eagle perched on swastika,
skull
tolling below
rim of a shoddy
uniform,
braids for slaughters earned
mounted on the shoulder.
lightning on hat
on sleeve
on hilt.
The photos.
The awards.
The cries.
🔾
“I will kiss you with my hands open.”
El Moro rising from the chest of my grandmother
port of entry
swollen with merchant
cells
chemicals whistling
gates open
constellation of sores
waxing crescent
shores
Spanish tongue
de la mamá
Zavala,
Capella at the tolling
uvula
licking the moon
no me besas.
mis labios
please
you are beautiful
this is Hydra
I will wash
with my lips
my mother constellation
“Te beso con mis manos abiertos.”
🔾
The grandfather clock
repaired,
blood let of minutes,
licked its last night when mamá died,
gasping for air,
father at the foot,
grandfather at the head,
shouldering
the last toll
she sang my name at the hour.
🔾
The father clock,
the clock,
the blood of my ancestors,
called me with a pistol,
at the hand of my father,
whispering “goodbye,”
whispering revive,
revive the clock,
the toll,
the secret of the blood let minute.
Bianca Viñas is a graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts Writing and Publishing Program. Her debut anthology, Life Lines: Rewriting Lives from Inside Out, a collection of short stories and essays by incarcerated women, is set for release with Green Writers Press in Summer 2019. Bianca is currently completing her first novel, a hybrid work of poetry, medical research and narrative prose. She edits novels and is on staff at Hunger Mountain Magazine. Bianca lives in a studio in Montpelier, Vermont near her writing family.
Featured image: KELLEPICS (Pixabay)
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