Carmen Calatayud
Bio:
Carmen Calatayud is the daughter of a Spanish immigrant father and Irish immigrant mother. Her poetry book In the Company of Spirits (Press 53) was a runner-up for the Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award and a finalist for the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Her work has been featured in print and online by Cutthroat, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, Virginia Quarterly Review and other journals, and most recently anthologized in Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice (University of Arizona Press).
Hurricane Season
1.
You,
perched next to a powder blue
pillow on the black vinyl couch
parked in front of a TV
that shows poker cards
flicker and fly while you drink
your fifth bottle of beer.
The waters come.
2.
Pink bruises imprint your lover’s spine.
You say
You don’t remember
Her back was in pieces,
put together as
a stained-glass puzzle
and now moves
like a stripped gear shaft.
The waters come.
3.
This lover pauses at an imaginary altar
for the ex-girlfriend she’ll never meet.
You say
You don’t remember
How you lit
that woman’s skin on fire, and
the second-degree burns
turned the smooth skin of her legs into
wild sockeye salmon flesh.
The waters come.
4.
Today this lover tries to forget that you almost turned her
into a ripe
hibiscus flame
last summer.
You say (of course)
You don’t remember.
She smells like burned salt.
She’s a heavy blackened wind.
The waters come.
5.
Who knows what lives in your memory
(You don’t remember)
(You don’t remember)
(You don’t remember)
Or
if the combustion in her head
will burn her brain.
The waters come.
6.
If waves wash you away
with the giant screen that soothes you,
your lover will leap on the coffee table that’s left
dance by flashlight
pirouette
into still damp air.
Mermaid Overdose
1.
Your fluid-filled lungs leak
into the lake of your chest.
Rivers swish inside your arms.
That must be the reason for the
elegance of your stroke. I’m with
each drop of you that flows
into the Potomac. When you
float by, I know that legs are tails
are tributaries. Everything about you
leads to the sea and I can’t get
there as fast as my heart can fly.
2.
All those drugs disposed in the ocean:
You’ve absorbed them through your
gills and open slivers of skin.
Now you can’t get enough of the high
seas and I can’t track you above or below
the water. Even when I toss an inner tube,
you dive in the opposite direction.
Me wanting you to want to
save yourself.
3.
Watch me stand on the Maryland shore,
remembering your wet chest and
pastel blue hands. You moved like a
ballerina. I sighed like a tired dog
and drooled. How did your turquoise
scales become the body I loved?
I still collect shells that reflect
your mermaid beginnings
and spray of words.
4.
Imagine a trail of pills
across the sand. I bend
over to pick one up.
One less for you to swallow,
one more that might lead to your tail.
You were swimming
through addiction
and I had no say.
If only I could have entered your aortic chamber,
healed the watery moon of your heart.
Now I just listen for a beat,
a splash of you:
Part woman, part fish,
part unnamed star.
Watching the War, 1975
The Fall of Saigon: Over the course of April 29, 1975 and into the following morning, Operation Frequent Wind transported more than 1,000 Americans and more than 5,000 Vietnamese out of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War.
Too hard to take her father’s blows for talking during the news so after 8 pm,
she moves to her room
slips into a narcotic haze.
After more chugs of cherry cough medicine,
the empty bottle glows:
Iridescent, a pale ruby cylinder.
Cuts across her wrist horizontally three times
with a rusty razor,
not knowing that vertical
is the way to go.
Blood barely blossoms from her shy left wrist.
********
This first-generation American girl is addicted to music
that spins on a spinach green record player from Sears.
She puts the needle down on the White Album:
Number 9 Number 9 Number 9
John Lennon says over and
over as she lies on the floor,
ear to the speaker
to float away from the war zone
created by parents
who survived wars themselves.
********
On the news that night, she saw Vietnamese
climb the embassy walls.
U.S. Marines slammed their gripping fingers with butts of guns,
watched men and women fall.
The reporter said one Vietnamese government official who was left behind
shot himself to death.
********
The girl imagines she is airlifted to another place
by grabbing hold of a magic helicopter,
ready to hang on like the Vietnamese people
who reached for the skids
of the last American chopper that took off in April ‘75
but were left behind: running, jumping, crying out.
********
Codeine makes the music rise like an aquamarine wave
and crash across her cheeks.
Then Jimi Hendrix comes back to life
to take her from this shell-shocked house
to a place where everything’s fluid and blue.
Jimi reels her into an etherized dream
where there’s a reunion with the dead
as he sings Castles Made of Sand.
Subscribe
We use cookies to enable essential functionality on our website, and analyze website traffic. By clicking Accept you consent to our use of cookies. Read about how we use cookies.
Your Cookie Settings
We use cookies to enable essential functionality on our website, and analyze website traffic. Read about how we use cookies.
Cookie Categories
Essential
These cookies are strictly necessary to provide you with services available through our websites. You cannot refuse these cookies without impacting how our websites function. You can block or delete them by changing your browser settings, as described under the heading "Managing cookies" in the Privacy and Cookies Policy.
Analytics
These cookies collect information that is used in aggregate form to help us understand how our websites are being used or how effective our marketing campaigns are.