True Confessions Variations

(The Homemaker of the Month)

Ysidro calls me at night, meeya carra. his big

blonde bean, and slides his moustache across my

neck. he’s dark, and like I imagine his country,

flat and arid, face a painted clay pot drying

on the windowsill, on his lip, trails a snake

with black twisted rattles. he asks me about

my youth, and I tell him like the others, that

they said I would never amount to anything. be

cause of my size mostly, that I was a big American

girl. raw and wide I sent away from catalogues,

for plastic barrettes shaped like musical notes, and

Cuban heeled shoes. I was dreamy too, and once

painted my naked body like a guitar, with metal

frets and silver strings. he caught lizards and

tamed them, and saw an orange blister ripped sun.

its aurora looked liked yellow music, and his eyes

narrow as he plucks it from my stomach.

I had Matthew from the first marriage, when I

was sixteen. we would huddle in a striped mattress

that was split in the seams, and I thought of

my husband as a cowboy, when his leather face

creased and stretched. in college I later learned

about kings, and ancient gods who sent their love

in showers of coins, golden, manna from heaven.

and I never talk about my first man, except to

say that he laid my head open and the scar-line

is his illegible signature. my son is more like

an immaculate conception, like my adopted girls

whose teeth and pupils are shaped like a stranger.

we ride to the lake and crush bread for the birds.

I like the geese with their masks and giraffe

necks. sometimes they hiss and you’d swear they

had a row of devil fangs under their poniard tongues.

but especially the swans, I can’t help but think

of them plucked and fleshy turning white and velvet,

like my husband pulling his hands through my henna

hair.

Ysidro is a groundskeeper and gravedigger. sometimes

we joke about dead business or a certain shift, and

we laughed about the recipe I have included;

Mexican Chicken Bake, we said: cremate a handful

of skinny bones, and sprinkle lightly over the

dinner table. but it’s peaceful work, and he rests

by the tombs, and weeds the paupers’ wooden crosses.

and tells them about the weather, and here in

Oskaloosa it couldn’t be finer. I am alone most

nights when he walks with sleeping Iowa, and my

imagination can turn black. I think of sewing

him a pole-bag, with cobra skin and vegetable

powder. with fathers and half shells. so he

can speak melodic incantations and command a blood-

less multitude. scary corpses turn to me, their

eye sockets contracting in the light.

we feed the birds and cook a chicken. in a taco

shell it’s perfect, spicy and delicious, like my

sweet Spanish lover’s touch.

Copyright Credit: Lynn Crosbie, “True Confession Variations” from Miss Pamela’s Mercy (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1992): 121-23. Reprinted with permission of House of Anansi Press. www.anansi.ca

Source: Miss Pamela’s Mercy (House of Anasi, 1992)