Rattlesnake Allegory

Joe Jimenez

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781597098991
• eBook ISBN: 9781597098366
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

These poems are about “the moment inside the body / when joy is not born as much as it is made out of anything / the rest of the world doesn’t want.”  Using land and South Texas’s flora and fauna as references, these poems explore aloneness and manhood as articulations of want, asking the reader to “take a moan by the hand, see what good it does.” Thematically, these poems address loss after transformative experiences, admitting to a reader, “All night I might fathom taking back / something precious / that somehow, / long ago, or not so long ago, I don’t know, / ripped off, / yanked from bone, / sloughed off like a husk.”  These poems are about getting to know one’s body after being distanced from it, of recognizing a queer brown body inextricably belonging to lineages of loss, and then realizing that some new body has emerged from where the old parts were lost, or taken, as in the final sequence of four poems, “Lechuza Sketches,” where the speaker manifests the Tex-Mexican folkloric figure of a lechuza, the human-owl hybrid said to inhabit parts of South Texas and the Northern Mexican border. In the end, this is a collection of poems about more deeply engaging with one’s queerness, one’s brownness, and understanding that there are parts inside us we never knew existed, or as the Lechuza Sketches speaker offers, “In the world, some part of us is often / unseen / & not glorious. / But what if we are? / Glorious. Seen.”

II

Allegory of the Rattlesnake

1

Under sun, in debris: a cascabel hums its whole nautilus
of fangdom and scales—a harmony.

But it came for us, we said. We heard, and we’d heard:
They’ll come for you. They lash out.
Animus: pain :: And when it came—

As demon. As menace, as monolith, They as Goliath.

Everything we heard about rattlesnakes: cascabel
made of god but less godly
than us—

2

Understand this: Anyone can suffer.

3

In my most Mexican self, I understand the sun built a fire, for he once was a god
who said: the body cannot be dispensed
unless I allow it. So I kneel,
so I show the sun my slow throat and hope He can fathom me whole.
I’d suckle obsidian for a chance. At wholeness.
But ardor. But fear. Ayotzinapa. But prayer. Ferguson like Juarez.

4

Until I learn to unlove arrangements that make me.
Until I hold a man in my mouth like a mouse or a cricket, a white moth, a whole hare.

5

It is no surprise. We refute wholeness.
Of those we believe will do us harm:

He deserved it, we said.
Look at the shit he’d done.
What was she wearing?
Had it coming, so many of us agreed.

6

Because Fear is not an accident.

7

Ego hissing. Bravado that is blabbering. Cascabel’s teat-pink suit, its fang wilt and coil.
Fiasco of scales and long rope.

Under debris, in sun: my body and his body your body her body their body—

on asphalt,
on hillsides,
in trash heaps,
in rivers,
in fires,
in a great desert—

As demon. As menace, as monolith, They as Goliath.

Anywhere in the world—anyone can suffer.

Nocturne for Rattlesnakes and Lechuzas

i.

Anzaldúa once admitted it took her forty years
“to enter into the serpent, to acknowledge I
have a body.”
I used to think I’d never hold forty
years
in my mouth.

She was cutting quelites with her
family. Wild Mexican greens. The ones that
had “outlived the deer’s teeth.”

Fuck, she can write so beautifully.

When I die, I want to also be buried
in deer’s teeth. I want my mouth to fill
gently with sand and lechuzas.

A few times I have thought of laying
my big body beside a deer—.

Near a road.
In a field made of huisache and moon—.

To hold its long breath, to beg its hot
deerheart to beat slowly
and only for me.

ii.

Tonight, I near 40: I trace an owl on a pad,
watch a television show where people make
beautiful things
out of organza and seams.

The owl steadies my hand:
wing coverts, tarsus, face-disc—
scapulars and steam.
My wrist believes it is young.
Control comforts a heartspan,
where it rests.
Alula, it seems—

but I also want to make beautiful things—.
Sometimes, I want others to see me
as beautiful, too.
Not rough, not voracious.
Not ever wielding the machete of my
body, splitting anyone in two.

But I don’t want to have to lose
the brownness I’m in to obtain it—
beauty,
gentleness, flight—.

My body is full of tunnels.
Hollowness, but not like a bird’s.

I’m ashamed for fearing heights,
so I’d make a really fucked-up bird.

Sometimes, I think not wanting to
look out the window of a high-rise makes
me less of a man.

Sometimes, I fear the dim, firm husk
that grows over me makes me more of one.

iii.

In the anecdote Anzaldúa shares, she is
snake-bitten, she can feel venom in her
body, and she buries the rattlesnake that
bites her

“between the rows of cotton.”
She says this on page 48.

She says the earth is a coiled serpent.

And she is immune.

Often, I wish I, too, could
bury the rattlesnake. Maybe digging
a hole is where my beauty will be found.

But I haven’t been in a cotton field in a good
grip of years.

But sometimes, I simply want the snake
to enter me, to coil inside me

and stay.

Most times, I just wish I could spend
all night digging holes in a field
of huisache
and deer hearts and moon—
as if anyone could still be immune.

Some nights, I just want to hold a man in my arms because this would make everything better in my life—.

a comfort I frame—biceps and all
of my Mexican tattoos, my bulldog chest, and stuttering lung,
whispers that come only from another man’s scalp
when the whole world inside him is a fingernail
or quiet like a small bucket of snails.
Even when I’m a remolino,
more so, then, especially, I wish my kiss tenderness,
enough to make a man’s heart burst
into a thousand desert owls—wingbeat,
featherness, beak prod, and screech.
Last week, I was a pendulum in a fantasy—versatile,
swinging back, forth, into, deeply.
Being entered is when I know I am human.
Being entered is when I know I’m a part of something bigger.
Again. Equilibrium.
Evenness. And here it is: I’ve come here to love
breath in my bones when skin falls off the world.
and who doesn’t carry some sort of trap on his knuckles?
The moment inside the body
when joy is not born as much as it is made out of anything
the rest of the world doesn’t want.

Wood & Clouds Remix

1.Indeed, holding a
man is formless.

2.A body deprived will stutter its mass, a field test in slobber.

3.A man is a body; a man is also a cloud & a moment, a trajectory, an idea.

4.Nothing murmurs forever: not a thing so slurred will last.

5.& Forever exists to molecules, not only for the nextness of the heart.

6.Forever as all the throat can cite when it’s gagging.

1.Though I haven’t slept inside a mouth made of wind.

2.Though formlessness is nonetheless a form.

3.Though I haven’t slathered my torso & thighs in patience procured via bone-work with deer & the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• I
• II
• III
• Biographical Note
• Back Cover