Tender Machines

“We must be the inviolate / petals,” quips the speaker in “The Mothers,” the opening poem of J. Mae Barizo’s second collection, Tender Machines. Later, she adds, “These days the abdomen / blossoms, but we must be / boneless, edible fish.” Barizo peels back the liminal borders of self as mother in poems that wander the streets of New York. Shaping the collection’s sonic landscape are fugues that serve as both form and subject for ekphrasis; a lover who plays piano in the distance; the speaker playing Bach on the spinet. In “Clavier,” self and instrument are one:

It hurt to be
so pliant, twigs
beneath the fingers.

Hand covering mine
to keep the bird
from pulsing out.

The city contributes its own sounds as “sirens yelp like pint-size / dogs,” and the speaker hears “the Dominican / lady in the foyer singing / anywhere, anywhere.” Looking back, the speaker recalls when

[t]he street machines were singing and how young
we were and always eating. Buying food
at the bodegas, fleshy Jewish rolls, nectarines, skin-tight
plums.

The Canadian-born Barizo, whose parents emigrated from the Philippines, traces the colonial imprint of her mother’s maiden name, given to her great-great-grandmother by “a mad priest who impregnated women / in the village.” She confesses, “I didn’t expect life to be kind to me / with my skin and second-hand pearls.” Elsewhere she confronts her own complicity: “I’m writing you in yoga clothes made in the country / my parents left behind, an archipelago of over seven / thousand islands.”

What does it mean to survive? What does it mean to mother? Addressing her daughter, the speaker notes, “every day / I think we might die, I take you by / the hand and music pours down / the page . . . .” Ultimately, it is a tender expansiveness of the mind, its own music, that leads the speaker forward:

The child sleeps
and I find new ways
to write about stars.

Thinking of bandaged
light, scars on my arms
or the oldest bright

in the universe
moving through
astral storms