Arya F. Jenkins

Brava Brava
 
My mother who died long ago who only noticed my “beautiful arms” two weeks before she died, who praised everything I ever wrote, when she could listen to my voice reading it, who loved gossip more than anything except Shirley Hazzard’s novels, who enjoyed buying me clothes and having me model them like I was Ali McGraw, whom she swore I looked like, although only now do I look like her. That mother with whom I spoke Spanish so rapidly I might have been rapping, with whom silences were impossible and deadly, as if we were a theatre of two, the two of us incomparable, unstoppable. She watched me swim in the buff while walking to and fro alongside the pool in awe of my youthful grandeur, that daughter who seemed to say and do everything she had only dreamed of. That mother whose carcajadas could uplift an entire room, whose expressive hands stopped speakers dead, whose staccato sentences mesmerized, written as well as told. That mother gone with all her wonder, drive and words, color, generosity and madness. All of these being the same in Spanish and English --how we contrived to awaken everything in the other we could not conjure elsewhere--for lack of inspiration. To that mother I raise the empty glass already drained, the café already drunk, the notebook in which stories and poems have been woven with her bravura efficiency. A toast to the unspoken and unfinished pulse that pauses only when this dies.

**
 
Escape Routes
  
When I drank straight through days in my 20s in the Berkshires I lived with an older artist who was by then already bored with me as we had left the madness of summer in Provincetown for the frigid simplicity of a mice-infested cabin. Artie set traps inside paper bags so the poor mice ran around the living room in drag before dying. I had a big brown desk facing woods stained white that winter when I sat with an empty notebook wondering what if anything I had to say. All the furniture was brown. In the end I couldn’t get beyond reading a paragraph, my jitters so bad I couldn’t go anywhere and his temper and disgust over my drinking so constant I feared breathing, although I did feed carrots to two deer as they knelt before that wide window on two successive days. Making Artie snap as it was the last of our refrigerated food and we were snowbound. Luckily I was seeing a shrink who told me where to go, so I took Artie’s money while he was out cold and whisper-called a taxi at dawn armed with nothing but a pen and pea coat. I don’t remember drying out in a long-term rehab where they made us take early morning walks in spring. I remember listening to birds for the first time taking in the shock of their music. It took another year before I spoke.
 
**
 
Legacies
  
The spring Kurt Cobain expelled his brain matter into the universe I was living in a studio in Lenox, Massachusetts where one of Chet Baker’s girlfriends, a jazz singer, had once lived, and feeding on jazz and the kind of poetic rants that made Cobain’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” a kind of anthem after he died. In the fall I went to Ithaca to study Buddhism, space and time, which seemed to me then easier to understand than the world I lived in. Courtney Love brought Cobain’s ashes over to the monastery where I was studying and monks blended the ashes into clay memorials while a long line of students formed outside hoping to see and touch Cobain’s remains, although the miniature statues bearing them were long gone by then. A while after that a friend who always said, “just shoot me,” whenever circumstances conspired against her, threatened suicide after her girlfriend kicked her out after tossing her clothes out a window of their fifth story New York City walk up. I knew she’d bought a gun and tried talking her down while driving I-95 straddling two lanes until cops stopped me. Eventually my friend sobered up and got rid of the gun, but soon after that the son of a friend of ours shot himself and my friend, the one who’d once threatened suicide, volunteered to clean up the mess, never talking about that experience afterward or repeating her favorite line either, just shoot me. The other day I watched Cobain in a video yelling “hello hello hello,” surrounded by shaggy-haired guys, naked from the waist up, seemingly unhinged as they tossed themselves left, right and on top of one another grunge style, in unique camaraderie. Making me wonder if Kurt was still here, still making music, whether the dragon ride of young white male violence might be at least a little appeased. Whether there might be something beyond the sirens, bullets and passions gone astray that have become all we can count on.

**

With Dylan in Ithaca
 
We sit outside a café past midnight hovering with secrets in our big dark coats. It’s so cold I can’t tell if smoke coming from our mouths is from our hand-rolled cigarettes or the weather. Stars high up shine little light from their dome. We watch with the rare anticipation of creatures accustomed to the dark while songs by Natalie Merchant and Bjork slip out cracked windows into the night. Nearby frozen waterfalls hold their breath, brick walks lead everywhere and nowhere at once, bridge walls beckon us to peek over dubious destinies. All our half-formed stories and dreams arch up from the stillborn ground perched and ready to leap into the mouth of the devouring world. Students, poor with everything but words, we rail against everything marginal and unafraid, drinking little cups of bright darkness.

**

When We Begin
 
Not as excited by movies as I am he thrills at the mysterious library at my alma mater, its tight-lipped winding staircases and books to the ceiling, dusty light streaming in, conducting relative silence. He makes love slowly, plucking a book from its place, opening and closing it tenderly, turning it over in his hands before returning it respectfully. Outside on Argos Field he tears off his tee, one breezy leap and he swings on the crossbar of a football goal, stealing my heart that easily. At the movies totally open to the screen, watching Shirley MacLaine break down in a hospital because her daughter is in pain I start sobbing and he presses me against his shoulder as if the rock of it abrogates eventualities, sickness and death--will we also leave one another? I am young, the realization fleet. The road to him is pale, languorous and sweet. His blue gaze promises forever. There are no questions in-between, only liquid silences, caught breaths as we dive in.

**

Arya F. Jenkins is a Colombian-American poet and writer whose poems have appeared in many journals such as The Ekphrastic Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Jerry Jazz Musician, OyeDrum Magazine and Reverie Magazine. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has been widely anthologized. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks, a short story collection, Blue Songs in an Open Key (Fomite Press), and a novel, Punk Disco Bohemian (NineStar Press). Her latest poetry chapbook is Singing in the Dark (Alien Buddha Press, 2022).