The Verging Cities

Natalie Scenters-Zapico

• Publisher: Center for Literary Publishing
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781885635433
• eBook ISBN:
  9781885635440
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

From undocumented men named Angel, to angels falling from the sky, Natalie Scenters-Zapico's gripping debut collection, The Verging Cities, is filled with explorations of immigration and marriage, narco-violence and femicide, and angels in the domestic sphere. Deeply rooted along the US-México border in the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, and Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, these poems give a brave new voice to the ways in which international politics affect the individual. Composed in a variety of forms, from sonnet and epithalamium to endnotes and field notes, each poem distills violent stories of narcos, undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and the people who fall in love with each other and their traumas.

The border in Scenters-Zapico's The Verging Cities exists in a visceral place where the real is (sur)real. In these poems mouths speak suspended from ceilings, numbered metal poles mark the border and lovers' spines, and cities scream to each other at night through fences that "ooze only silt." This bold new vision of border life between what has been named the safest city in the United States and the murder capital of the world is in deep conversation with other border poets—Benjamin Alire Saenz, Gloria Anzaldúa, Alberto Ríos, and Luis Alberto Urrea—while establishing itself as a new and haunting interpretation of the border as a verge, the beginning of one thing and the end of another in constant cycle.

CON/VERGE

Un cómplice perfecto. Un hermano gemelo. Hable de ser diferente, de descubrir algo importante. Algo por que pelear. Algo por que vivir. Lo que sea, una boca, una mirada, una mirada, un trato, un pacto: nunca separarnos.

A perfect accomplice. A twin. I talked about being different, about discovering something important. Something to fight for. Something to live for. Anything, a mouth, a look, a look, a deal, a pact: never split up.

—Voy a Explotar / I’m Gonna Explode (film 2008)

CROSSING

Angel buys a passport made at a print shop for fifty dollars—perfect
but for a hair stuck in the laminate by his date of birth. Not noticeable,

he says and I believe him. We walk across the bridge to Ciudad Juárez
and I expect there to be an explosion—for the streets to glow red.

It’s been five years since we’ve been back and the city is a ghost,
but the traffic is alive. It’s still a city, I say. Let’s go to a bar, he says.

We pose in faux fur with cigarettes for nightlife pictures, get vicious,
and leave at 3:00 a.m. I stumble in my platform heels and stop

at another bar to get drinks one last time in a to-go cup. By 3:30
I turn litterbug and throw our empties into the ink-stained street.

I brush my hands against the chain-link fence as we cross
the bridge back to El Paso. Cameras every ten feet—we smile

and kiss for them. Behind us a man yells, That’s it? That’s all you have for me,
murder capital of the world? Border agents wave us across—

I’m too white to tell and Angel looks clean enough, but one of us is illegal.
No one says a word—we all breathe pollution. To think we didn’t need

to get a visa. To think we could have saved the fifty dollars. Still easy,
we laugh and agree to cross again next weekend. We wonder

why we call each other Cielo, why we call each other Angel? We wonder
how two cities are split, how they swell. Watch how they collide.

HOW BORDERS ARE BUILT

You lay me on blue sheets. I put two fingers in my mouth and they disappear.
In your hair a crown of border patrol point their guns at me; they watch
with night vision goggles to see if I’ll wade across our river. I lick

the black corners of your ears; one agent shoots my shoulder. I wonder if you
could take them down while you’re on top of me, put them in a box somewhere.
I tell you I am desert: my face cracks; reptiles hide in my shadows; my hair grows

because the wind pulls it. You push your face into my ear and I hear words
in dust storms. I cough as you push your shoulder into my mouth. My eyes
closed, I can feel the brush that grows along your arms reach for the sun.

You pull your face away and cry into my mouth. I can’t drink all of you; tears spill
down my neck and across my body. I flood until you are swallowed too; grated
metal collapses into our streets; we pool around concrete tenements, land that never

holds a river quiet. We eat our border every hundred years then build it up again.
We ask each other if we’ve carried any foreign items today, barbed wire
fences stapled to our teeth, avocado pits in our back pocket. We say no.

BIBBED IN PAISLEY HE READS ŽIŽEK INSTEAD

of pulling September’s steak tips from
a bag of peas in the freezer. On his lips

one hundred blue petals, dried flowers
from the bottom of a former lover’s vase.

He licks his fingers, touches the hairs
of milled tree trunk in each page.

I wait; a flood runs from my mouth complete
with a rusted Honda Civic—the windows

all busted. My veins sprout to link my temples
to an electric socket. I black out and then

the most angelic resurgence of light . . .
He tells me I have become

an example of Žižek—The unreal, we are
fascinated by the unreal. I reach for my back

molar, turn it to the right and braid
my hair. If I am unreal, I whisper, you must

be as real as my hair, which I will cut
with these scissors. You tell me: Cut it

short. I’ve always wanted to know if I could make
love to a boy I’ve always known was a woman.

DEAR ANGEL,

There are days when the world is filled with numbers and we are bad at math. We eat breakfast in f(x) = 2x and fuck in d(5) = 76f + 86π. These are days you become sick of guessing the moon’s surface area. I have no numbers, you say. I am named Angel in a sea of other Angels; how will you ever know to love me?

And I say, I’ll call you the number 56; one day we’ll learn to make love in differential equations. You say, I hate that number and I want to see objects in your face and see faces in the things you’ve left behind—I ask for such small pareidolia.

I don’t speak English well and I don’t speak Spanish well and now I am illiterate. I will learn this lamp as I have learned your face—in grooves, shape, and gradation. They will say I am not a poet and I will know all the ways they’ve been scarred by the ring of their voices. I will sing, I will sing, I will sing—turned dumb, I will sing you dry.

I tell you to meet me at the point of a Mercator triangle at 7:00 but can’t find you. Our earth is made of triangles that never measure 180˚. What mathematical proof to run my hands along the rocks and let them drink of me. What lie to divide land in lines that don’t exist, to attempt to leave the body on a dark, studded night.

You will go to the desert and there will be gull. You will run to the sea and there will ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Con/Verge
• Di/Verge
• Re/Merge
• Verge
• Acknowledgments