Lima :: Limón

by Natalie Scenters-Zapico

Overview

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“Through a range of forms—tercets, prose hybrids, lyric strophes, and more—the poems in Scenters-Zapico’s second collection . . . incisively interrogate the aesthetics of cultural difference.” ―Publishers Weekly, starred review In her striking second collection, Natalie Scenters-Zapico sets her unflinching gaze once again on the borders of things. Lima :: Limón illuminates both the sweet and the sour of the immigrant experience, of life as a woman in the U.S. and Mexico, and of the politics of the present day. Drawing inspiration from the music of her childhood, her lyrical poems focus on the often-tested resilience of women. Scenters-Zapico writes heartbreakingly about domestic violence and its toxic duality of macho versus hembra, of masculinity versus femininity, and throws into harsh relief the all-too-normalized pain that women endure. Her sharp verse and intense anecdotes brand her poems into the reader; images like the Virgin Mary crying glass tears and a border fence that leaves never-healing scars intertwine as she stares down femicide and gang violence alike. Unflinching, Scenters-Zapico highlights the hardships and stigma immigrants face on both sides of the border, her desire to create change shining through in every line. Lima :: Limón is grounding and urgent, a collection that speaks out against violence and works toward healing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556595318
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	05/14/2019
Pages:	80
Sales rank:	1,128,289
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.50(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Natalie Scenters-Zapico is the author of The Verging Cities, as well as the recipient of the PEN American/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and the National Association of Chicano/a Studies Book Award.

Read an Excerpt

The Hunt As a child a macho told me to close my legs or he’d take me to a dark room & make me cry. I closed my legs. He asked me to give him a kiss. I gave him a kiss. I could not stop crying, & he could not understand why. :: My father was a ghost in our house. He would not speak for days, then drop a glass of water on the kitchen floor. My mother always swept up his shatters & buried them in the yard. :: At thirteen a macho put his hands on my knees, then became tarantula, travelled up my skirt. I didn’t scream because I felt chosen. I felt lucky he had chosen me to be hunted. :: Machos hunt to watch women in orgasm. Not because they like to see women in pleasure, but because they like to watch women close to death. :: Machos don’t know what it is to give birth to the dead. Machos know pleasure through release. Machos hunt to give pain & to witness pleasure. To testify: the resurrection of the body. :: I will not apologize for my desire to love a macho who could crush my skull with his bare fists. :: I apologize to a daughter for telling her to close her legs. Machos are hunting, always hunting to see women close to death. :: I work two jobs & still come home to an empty pantry. I am a bad woman when I can’t feed hunger. My labor: the taste of bleach after an alacrán stings my feet. :: I write to machos & never send my letters. In the age of los Zetas, I am a lucky hembra: I have a language to write of the violence of machos. :: I watch the azahars grow into lemons machos pull too early from their branches. I slice each lemon’s rind into translucent sheets & place each little sun under the tongue of my macho who eats & eats. Macho :: Hembra I laughed because, after all, isn’t that what women do—laugh at jokes at their own expense? I was his pocha hermosa. He’d done good because of my fair skin & green eyes. He liked keeping me in my underwear in his room. Like a porcelain doll come to life, I was the perfect object. I screamed & was ashamed. He’d hand me matches & I’d strike each one against my teeth to make a flame. I’d whisper in his ear bruto & he’d hush me with the word hocicona. I’d cry & he’d kiss me quiet. My whole face fit in his cupped hands. He was el macho :: I was la hembra. To clean his body I’d blow smoke from my cigarette on his shoulders. I told myself I had found un buen macho. He was mi cielo: sky of my many deaths. Lima Limón: :Infancia I want to be the lemons in the bowl on the cover of the magazine. I want to be round, to be yellow, to be pulled from branches. I want to be wax, to be white with pith, to be bright, to be zested in the corners of a table. I want you to say my name like the word: Lemon. Say it like the word: Limón. Undress me in strands of rind. I want my saliva to be citrus. I want to corrode my husband’s wedding ring. I want to be a lemon with my equator marked in black ink— small dashes to show my shape: pitted & convex.

Table of Contents

Lima Limón :: Infancia 5

Neomachismo 6

In the Age of Los Zetas 7

Lima Limon :: Azahar 9

At a Party I Tell a Story & Ask: 10

I Am à la Mode 12

My Macho Takes Care of Me Good 13

Lima Limón :: Madurez 14

Women's Work 15

He Has an Oral Fixation 16

Lima Limón :: Vejez 17

Sonnet for a Dollar 18

Kept 19

Discovery 20

I Didn't Know You Could Buy 21

Lima Limón :: Decrepitud 22

Macho :: Hembra 25

She Is à la Mode 26

My Gift 27

Macho :: Hembra 28

Aesthetic Translation 29

He Finds a Kissing Bug 32

More Than One Man Has Reached Up My Skirt 33

Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo, Mexico 35

Macho :: Hembra 37

In the Culture of Now 38

The Women Wear Surgical Masks 39

Mi Libro Gore 41

Macho :: Hembra 42

A Crown of Gold Snakes on My Head 43

My Brother 44

Notes on My Present: A Contrapuntal 45

Macho :: Hembra 47

One Body 48

There Is No Such Thing as Confession in Latinx Poetry 49

Macho :: Hembra 50

You Are a Dark Body 53

I Wait for a Bus 54

Bad Mother :: Bad Father 55

Receta en El Cajon 56

There Is a Bird in My Mouth 58

For My Son Born in La Mariscal 60

Last Night I Was Killed by Man 61

Criada 62

I Am with Child 63

Argyria 65

Marianismo 66

Buen Esqueleto 68

The Hunt 69

Notes 71

Acknowledgments 73

About the Author 75

Editorial Reviews

★ 02/25/2019

Through a range of forms—tercets, prose hybrids, lyric strophes, and more—the poems in Scenters-Zapico’s second collection (after The Verging Cities) incisively interrogate the aesthetics of cultural difference. “I want you/ to say my name like the word: lemon./Say it like the word: limón. Undress me/in strands of rind,” remarks the speaker in the opening poem. Scenters-Zapico, who grew up on the U.S.-Mexico border, examines this cross-cultural overlap, positing her speaker as being at once self and other, and suggesting the internalized gaze of the predominant culture. She provocatively reveals her speakers as being complicit in their own exotification and objectification, as she implores, “I want to be lemons in the bowl/ on the cover of the magazine.” Scenters-Zapico’s formal dexterity serves the book’s subject, as the instability of the language mirrors and complicates the speaker’s self-aware performances of cultural difference. In “My Macho Takes Good Care of Me,” she writes: “because he’s a citizen de los united estates./ I got a stove this big, a refri this full, a mirror/ just to see my pretty face.” Here, the speaker performs gendered tropes of femininity to serve her own material gain. Yet the neat tercets evoke her containment, problematizing the narrative itself. Throughout the collection, Scenters-Zapico inhabits an interstitial space between languages, forms, and traditions, evoking the fluidity of the self. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Reading the book doesn’t make me feel better. It makes me weep with anger and frustration. It opens the wounds people try to ignore. It calls the ambulance.”—Indiana Review “Her poems in this collection are dark, visceral, haunting, and will echo for days in your mind….Throughout, she builds and breaks down the boundaries of love, place, identity, and memory in ways that are unexpected, and uses them to great effect to write the political and engage us in the surreal violence of our time.” —American Literary Review “In these poems, the border is a powerful metaphor, but it is never merely trope; it is actual, political, damaging.”—The Kenyon Review “These poems are coyotes that will leave you waterless in the middle of the desert...The Verging Cities pulls no punches, yet it is also tender and intelligent.”—Blue Mesa Review “With poems that are as intelligent as they are urgent, Natalie Scenters-Zapico offers a necessary poetic voice in these perilous times.” —University of New Mexico English News & Notes “[B]ooks like The Verging Cities must be not only written, but read—and read well. You will not win a staring contest with Natalie Scenters-Zapico; this poet cannot, and will not, look away.”—American Microreviews and Interviews

From the Publisher