Gina Franco is from Morenci, Arizona. She currently lives and works in Illinois where she teaches English and creative writing at Knox College. Her poems have appeared in Fence, Black Warrior Review, The Georgia Review, and Crazyhorse. Her book is The Keepsake Storm (University of Arizona Press, 2004).

Her blog is at ghostword.blogspot.com

 

 

middle of our life I came to myself in a dark                                 

Let us suppose you're in a car with W and, fancy, you’re driving down from the mines past the tunnel and conveyor belts toward the underpass where the hill makes a steep blind turn and for just two seconds—

usually—

all is dark: but the road veers into the mill’s green lights and what emerges on the other side—what you see—is a gate, high chain link, and the hood of the car meets it neat: click: and simultaneously W: jumps from the car to free us of the chain, you: see you belly down on the hood where the impact thrusts you through the glass, see you hanging on, not what to, and W pulling free of his clothes see: W in sagging briefs and a wife-beater scrambling to the backside of the car: see him dirty and blood spattered: him in the headlights of an oncoming truck which you see when you see you are flesh mashed into the hood into the chain, thick, waking: truck: pain: reels round the bend like a thing on a string see: W straining at the back bumper to free us, the car between, see you seeing your face against the hood in the hood and it hits: you

think, and think you see it, you, even as your reflection absolves you from your thinking, becomes another breaking thing, a thing passing, a past: what the dark glass lets loose:

 

passed over the shadows and put our soles on their vanity which seems a body

America. At first I was alone, as when going home. The women I used to know were there on the sidewalks as they had been before. I had maps in my hands and at my feet, on the floor, my one long black bag rode with me past their faces garish blue, their faces mauled, made up, their faces splayed in the surfaces, passing, where I repeat myself too.

I like you. I do.

But the mall went a long way out so I began walking. I began talking to you, cousins. Someone has drawn you in soft dark pencil, fetish and leathered, lithe cousins. Someone has left a body in the sand grass, human, pale, horned as an antelope and socket-eyed.

Blades through the eyes. They gutted you.

Back towards where we came—to where we will come again—you will towards the cities, the escalating windows in the sun, the glass rivers cutting through our many middle-americas, that side, that side, that side, that side, that side, the sun drawn in the glass, the drowned sun and the drowned rising, sinking again, eddying against the bank. Towards the bank.

Mule. Someone crossed you.

See the sweet white flowers in the grass? They spread their faces, they lift their fair faces from the fields. They are horned; they are socket-eyed. They are negatives. They are precisely alike: like that, the body in the grass horns into the sun, my cousins. Like you. Like you.

I do.

 

they had to come backward for to look before them was denied          

The mother’s backyard was the grandmother’s backyard too. The worms sluicing bed dirt, the grease pit and tin toolshed: all heaped on the same

plot the chinaberry sank roots into and spattered with seed. The grandfather slung his leather canteen from the tree, and there it hangs over the shaded workhorse, a cool wet skin on a rope, cheek

level, turning to and fro on the earth where Will drinks from it. Pausing. Thinking about my question. What is

mine? Infer—no—envision this, Will says. The circularity of it. Its machinery, its gyre maw opening outward, downward, all ways at once the more you dig it. What is straight

forward is you never get out. The grandfather pulls a lever and the dump car dumps pulls a lever the dump car dumps. What is a concentric way

of putting things, also, this mine of yours: it owns your ass. —Wait, I say. He was a dowser too. Freedom there, no? —No. That’s what I’m talking about, Will says. Plotting. Mere story:

the water table underground makes its line to the sea: the grandmother says get that thing out of my sight I

won’t have it around me to the grandfather whittling his dowser on the back porch and the grandfather pauses. Holds up his rod, points the shaft at his sack dripping

from the tree and says where do you suppose that came from? You drink well. You choose.

—So then what does she choose, I ask. Will wipes his wrist across his lips a little exasperated, says: a little history for you? There was a daughter. She chose story. They all did.

The mother’s backyard was the grandmother’s backyard too. The worms sluicing bed dirt, the grease pit and tin toolshed: all heaped on the same