To the Boy Who Was Night

“We’ve always been violent toward stars.” So begins “Stars Breaking,” a poem from the earliest of six collections represented alongside new work in Rigoberto González’s To the Boy Who Was Night: Poems: Selected and New. The poem’s piñata party features the speaker’s Abuelo, “bed-ridden, broken- / boned, and outnumbered by a riot / of children.” Abuelo returns in the new poem “Things I Find in Abuela’s Bathroom Closet,” where the child speaker discovers towels, shoe polish, a wig, and … a plastic penis.

Other new poems encompass still-fresh grief for a mother lost at a young age and address the difficulties of coming of age as a gay child who tries on Abuela’s veil and “mami’s lipstick” as a path to transformation:

 

how I shuddered,
shaking off the cold gaze
of ridicule from school. I learned to be

as confident as a butterfly, as elegant
as a moth: dodging shame by coming out
of hiding every day. And then each night.

González’s body of work moves across borders, whether those of migration, gender, or the bloody boundaries between life and death. Early poems like “Morticians’ Secrets” and “The Slaughterhouse,” from So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water until It Breaks (1999), peer into gruesome workplaces. In the latter, “A pyramid of pig heads / stares out the open door: outside / the men wash off their blood-gloves,” but “their hands still stink of knife blades, / of prongs, and of those fingers / that knot the rope so well.” The mortician resurfaces in the 2011 Black Blossoms, its title poem, a response to Goya, populated by “[o]ld widows” whose

tongues

deflate with your thighs and breasts, and as your

 

bodies spasm at the last chance
for sensation: the pucker and stretch in the sutured

 

center of your gray vaginas.

It is fitting that the new poems turn to the coronavirus and to questions about choosing where we die. As the speaker considers the “re- / patriation ceremony of 200 + victims of COVID-19,” all Mexicans who lived in New York, the longing for home becomes clear: “Burial at home no longer matters to the dead // but makes all the difference to the living.”