Lotería

“Flick the cards down quickly,” a screenwriter once advised me. I thought of this counsel as I read Esteban Rodríguez’s Lotería, which takes its name from a popular game of chance in Mexican culture. Each poem takes one card as its title and uses that theme to explore an aspect of the narrator’s life. Written in single-stanza vertical oblongs, the poems evoke portraits, which seems fitting, since many of them sketch an individual in thumbnail narratives.

Often, it’s one of the speaker’s parents or another blood relative. “La Luna” thrums with landscapes crossed in darkness, twanged with fear; the mother is

trying
to hide from the moon’s glow, to use the darkness
as a shield, to avoid the way it follows her,
has betrayed its storybook innocence
to help the swarm of agents searching

In “El tambor,” the father “moved closer to the river, / prayed his body would make it / through the baptism.” The subject of “El valiente” is an uncle who, “having crossed / into this country in the dead of night, / knew what it felt like to face a darkness / that seemed to be whispering his name.”

But the poems make sense as a deck of cards, too, as sets of symbols shuffled across the pages. The stories span from past to future and float free of a linear narrative. The word “hand” recurs, thrusting, crawling, drying, snatching, firing. The role of chance sharpens into focus most crisply in the final poem, “La chalupa,” where the speaker contemplates life on a canoe:

let your body welcome whatever
emotion you think you’ll soon feel,
because there is no one around you,
because history is raging somewhere
on shore, and because you accept,
for once, that whatever future lies ahead
was and will never be yours to control.