Rewinding

“I turned twenty-four and / dad decided to take / another stab at making / a man out of me,” writes Joshua Jennifer Espinoza in “Birthday Suits.” The pair embark on a pointedly masculine shopping trip: a suit-buying expedition in Hollywood. The cinematic location is fitting. Despite the pursuit of menswear, the speaker’s “inside places” “whisper / woman      woman         woman.”  She tries on the garments “behind / the heavy polyester curtain”—an in-store closet.  The clothes do not transform their wearer: “I did not forget / what I was / beneath the cover of the flesh: / five million faggy mountains.” Ultimately, rather than letting the suits hide her identity, the speaker hides the suits, stuffing them in the back of her trunk. There they lie for years, unworn.

 

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In “Ode to Dalya’s Bald Spot,” Angel Nafis sees a sign of illness as an occasion for blessing. Observing her sister, who suffers from lupus, is a “ritual”; Dalya’s “excellent nostrils” are “endless / holy wells,” and the titular bald spot is a sacred place. “i wanna / build a mosque right then / & there. make an annual / hajj to that brown meadow.”

Despite its bareness, the bald spot brims with significance. It’s “slick as a coin”—a comparison that suggests value. It’s a “little planet / uncolonized. flagless. / her awful, but her own.” “Uncolonized” by hair, the skin belongs all the more fully to Dalya. Nafis transforms her sister’s symptom into a strength, sanctifying it through metaphor.

 

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In “Brother as Younger Self, Humming,” Nadra Mabrouk recalls the everyday music of Shobra, a Cairo neighborhood: “children ripping / the clothes off lines, / pins scattering in a rounded clatter / of sharp-throated wooden notes.” While the local kids produce that racket, the speaker’s brother savors a recording of a favorite song, rewinding and replaying it multiple times.

He also performs a duet alongside his friend Mahmoud: when the other boy calls to him, he responds, “Mahmoud, wallahi,” or “Mahmoud, I swear to Allah,” a promise to come soon. The poem’s conclusion enters the friend’s mind, providing a memory within this memory—and another scene of waiting. Mahmoud, who misses his father, reflects that “sometimes at night, / if he closes his eyes hard enough, / he hears the din of keys / against the door.” As Mahmoud imagines that cherished noise, so does the speaker resurrect the long-silenced sounds of her youth.

 

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The Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico in 1519, and over the following several years, he invaded and defeated the Aztec Empire. In “‘Un Tintero,’ Inkwell,” Desirée Alvarez considers the reports that Cortés sent the Spanish king from the Americas.

As she discusses the letters’ repetitiveness, Alvarez herself reiterates words and phrases: “on each page a horse dies,” “on each page the future arrives,” “on each page the people appear to walk / over their dead.” Yet the present-day author meaningfully differentiates her writing from that of Cortés, insisting on a fact that the conquistador ignored: “Never does he say this was their home we took.”