Quinceañera
1
My body he burned ironing the waxpaper
of my breasts glue-gunning me papier-mâché
to the smell of arts & crafts in the recreation room
(every room after the recovery room)
like the cumbias of my girlhood dancefloors
flailing like Sunday Mass Nothing tasted so good
as the mango con chile from the fruit stand
at the razor-edge of town not even the lime-
squeezed beer its smell of night-
oak shimmering in the yard I’d climb
out my window & Danny with his brother’s truck
wasn’t the one I loved wasn’t the one
who squashed the June bugs spiraling
from my navel my collarbones the peach-
fuzzed skin of my newly-shaped breasts
(girls in alleyways if you survived dumpster-
diving you survived anything)
2
A mother lost her children
to her ex-husband her children with bruises
on their thighs in the apricot-soft
within their elbows photographs the judge ruled
circumstantial or unprovable the wife could not prove
I’m tired of women failing to protect what we love
When I say tired I mean the razorblade
I stole when I was fifteen from the hardware store
pressed to my wrists like cat claws
I told my mom were the neighbor’s cat
Mom she’s wild she’s untamable that fat tabby
(I don’t mean angry at the women but
unmothered things)
3
My ex’s nana had a stroke
& my ex-nuera Sally told me she asks for me time to time
my ex-railyard familia barbacoa & soaking beans
like I’m never drunk in the grass anymore wailing
like that alley tabby I’ve never stopped
needing—she lies in the bed
between my husband & me stomach pressed
to sheets & waiting hollowed calavera
en día de los muertos marigolds
laid on the altar of her belly button
though now she could be my ex’s daughter
at her Quinceañera in white like a mother in the news
who measured her daughter’s growth through
the years pressed in a wedding dress from the time
she was a baby God she was too young
4
& fifteen was a good year for me—
In the desert time of Valley ache in that wide bowl
of my hips bone dry asparagus fields crackling
heatwave where I’m still burying placenta fat as hearts
& beating back border roots with my fists
(I told the girl who said this poem is her one
chance the doors will shut love in your face love—
knock them down climb the fucking fire
escape) year I first learned to light myself
on fire call the firetruck of my own
body that holy water survival
Bird Bath (Baño de Pájaros)
Leonora Carrington, color serigraph on paper, 1974
The nunnery is made of them cutouts
in the rooftops their bodies their wings
the Sisters are turning into birds
with plague masks plague hearts
I call the birds like a lover
in my bed I’m a prayer blinded & turning
into a fountain taunting past a girlhood
of ritual first I needed to find the colors
flat on the wall in the Museum of Latin American Art
first I needed to remember what it felt like turning
pink & the Sisters scrubbing my wide pink eyes
sometimes I still turn into pearl-colored flamingos
before they reach the sea
before the algae that will keep a season of pink
before their mating dances & pairing for life
& flying again streamers peeling away after the party
or brine shrimp falling like petals from the beak
I was bathed in lies I was never that dirty
Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American poet from the Southwestern desert. She is the author of Landscape with Headless Mama (2015 Pleiades Editors’ Prize) and Protection Spell (2016 Miller Williams Series, University of Arkansas Press). Her honors include an NEA Fellowship, a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship, the Frost Place Latin@ Scholarship, the 2015 Lascaux Review Poetry Prize, the Pinch Poetry Prize, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best of the Net 2015, Best New Poets 2013, AGNI, Crazyhorse, Blackbird, TriQuarterly, and The Kenyon Review. She is Poetry Editor at Tinderbox Poetry Journal and teaches at The Poetry Barn.