Teeth Never Sleep

Poems

Ángel García

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781682260739
• eBook ISBN: 9781610756471
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Finalist, 2019 PEN Open Book Award

Winner, 2019 American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation

Drawing on folklore and fantasy, childhood memory and hallucination, and marked by a tone of piercing divulgence, Teeth Never Sleep nimbly negotiates the split consciousness a culture of dominance requires of men (especially men of color), highlighting the fissures in selfhood created by the pressure to seek submission over intimacy while still wanting desperately to be loved, and tracing the contorted route by which emotional pain finds expression in violence. "The night my girlfriend tells my mother I beat her, / I feel betrayed. This was a secret we kept between us. / That night, I was no longer my mother's loving son," the speaker in one poem confesses, and later "I never wanted to be this kind of animal."

And yet, through the lens of Ángel García's sharp imagining, men frequently appear as beasts (sometimes literally)—as hybrid beings both tender and brutal—that he steadfastly refuses to let off the hook as he obsessively catalogs the origins of toxic masculinity (the first time I made my mother cry, the first time I pitied my father, the first time I saw a girl bleed) and its quiet, lasting effects: "Still a part of me believes a / man shouldn't cry in front of a woman, even in the dark."

In a culture of weaponized masculinity, the poems in Teeth Never Sleep make a doorway of a wound, inviting readers to walk through and sit down inside the raw pain they harbor to meditate on two central, urgent questions: what it means to be a man and how, as a man, to love.

III

LOBE

We lie in bed when she tells me she is pregnant. I imagine a body, tender and small, the lobe of an ear floating in her belly. Already, I am eager to whisper a name.

Ángel, she says, I’m not ready to have a baby. I rise and sit on the edge of our bed, cover my face with my hands. Still, a part of me believes a man shouldn’t cry in front of a woman, even in the dark.

She sits beside me and searches for my face. Gently, she peels my hands away, finger after finger. She places her hands in mine. Our small embrace, warm, wet, and empty.

ASH

Children who know nothing of snow

dig in their thin pockets for change

to ask the woman pushing a shopping cart

for a raspado: her raspador scraping over

a block of ice, the already-melting mound

pushed into the mouth of a Styrofoam cup,

each crystal as white as the clouds passing

above. When they sit on the stoop to slurp

the sweetness their lips reveal everything

about want: limes hanging from a backyard

limb, strawberries bleeding on the kitchen

table, the blue of the stringy sky—nothing

is as it seems. Today, the sky is filled with

soot and most of California is burning. What

falls from the sky and piles onto the parked

cars is something like snow. Only there are

no children outside to roll snowmen, to lie

down on the lawn, coats growing wet as they

form angels, to pack snowballs tightly into fists.

Everything quiet.

I sit on the porch beside my girlfriend

watching ash fall and cover the city in gray.

She has lived on this block all her life and has

never seen snow. The first time I saw it fall

I was only five, living in Texas. I begged

my mother to let me outside, and after

she wrapped me in coat after coat I went out.

I tell my girlfriend I did not play—convinced

snow was some kind of miracle— tell her

how I knelt down to carefully scoop several

handfuls of snow into my eager mouth, and how

my tongue, for the rest of the day, kept burning.

EL ESPOSO DE LA LLORONA NEGOCIA

For years, I believed the myth. If not god,

at least the son of god. I am nothing, no one:

not water turned to wine turned to blood.

Only flesh. Only the marrow in my bones.

From the disintegrating temple of my body

I make this small offering for their resurrection:

Forgive me my sins.

Forgive me my sons.

Take me, instead.

BLOOD

I was eleven the first time I saw a girl bleed.

Between the boy’s restroom and a storage bungalow,

we watched, in rapture, two girls begin to beat

one another. A single drop blossoming on a white

blouse. It didn’t stop. Soon, it spread across their

pants, spilled onto the concrete beneath them,

one girl, the smaller girl, beaten so badly she

could not fight back and instead—her blouse

ripped open—covered herself, one hand over

her breasts, the other clutched into the black hair

of the girl who would not stop—the hollow pop

of her fists against cheek. I swear, I could smell

it, like rust in the air and as I walked back across

the blacktop, I felt it. Slowly, my stomach turned.

At home, I locked myself in the bathroom to vomit,

afraid to feel what between my legs grew swollen.

MEDITATIONS ON LEAVING

The first person to leave me

was my father. He took with him

my memories: hollow-boned

animals perched in his beard.

Flightless, in his back pocket,

the butterfly knife he gave me.

When you leave them, leave only what you can’t carry.

Beneath a mattress, stacked in the medicine cabinet,

on a note left in a book resting on a dust-covered shelf

leave your memories.

The first time I made my mother cry,

we sat at the dining room table. She

asked me to bring her a spoon. What

I brought was a joke: the largest one

I could find: serving size to imply how

much she ate. She left the room holding

her face in her moist hands. How hungry

she must have been for an apology.

Because I did not show remorse my

brothers beat me blue for what

I did not know: how easily

I could hurt the first woman I loved.

Think better days. Think early. Think Saturday mornings. Cartoons. Roadtrips. Salsipuedes. Your father driving sunny Sunday summer afternoons through a trail of red taillights. Not the coming or going, but being stuck in it. The long goodbye. Think what you’d give for one more warm morning: the smell of your parents still in bed making
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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• El Esposo de la Llorona Habla
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• V
• Notes