Woman Without Shame Read online

  ALSO BY SANDRA CISNEROS

  FICTION

  Martita, I Remember You / Martita, te recuerdo

  Have You Seen Marie?

  Caramelo

  Woman Hollering Creek

  The House on Mango Street

  Hairs / Pelitos

  Vintage Cisneros

  Bravo, Bruno

  Puro Amor

  POETRY

  Loose Woman

  My Wicked Wicked Ways

  Bad Boys

  MEMOIR / ESSAYS

  A House of My Own

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2022 by Sandra Cisneros

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Some poems originally appeared in the following publications: “Cielo sin sombrero / Sky Without a Hat,” “Creed,” and “Instructions for My Funeral” in Black Renaissance Noire; “My Mother and Sex” and “Remedy for Social Overexposure” in North American Review; “Smith’s Supermarket, Taos, New Mexico, at the Fifteen Items or Less Checkout Line” and “In My Little Museum of Erotica” in Ploughshares; “It Occurs to Me I Am the Creative/Destructive Goddess Coatlicue” in The Massachusetts Review; “Jarcería Shop” in Nepantla Familias; “I Should Like to Fall in Love with a Burro Named Saturnino” and “This in the News Unmentioned” in Kenyon Review; “You Better Not Put Me in a Poem,” “A Boy with a Machine Gun Waves to Me,” and “Exploding Cigar of Love” in Freeman’s; “Canto for Women of a Certain Llanto,” “El Hombre,” and “God Breaks the Heart Again and Again” in Huizache; “Día de los Muertos” in the Los Angeles Times; “Buen Árbol / A Good Tree” in Conjunctions; “Our Father, Big Chief in Heaven” and “Never Mention to the Daughters of the Republic of Texas” in The Paris Review. “El Hombre” was commissioned by the Dallas Museum of Art.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Cisneros, Sandra, author.

  Title: Woman without shame: poems / Sandra Cisneros.

  Description: First Edition. | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2022. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021048969 (print) | LCCN 2021048970 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593534823 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593534830 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

  Classification: LCC PS3553.I78 W67 2022 (print) | LCC PS3553.I78 (ebook) | DDC 811/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021048969

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021048970

  Cover photograph: La nopala (detail) by Flor Garduño

  Cover design by Emily Mahon

  a_prh_6.0_140874742_c0_r0

  for Norma Alarcón, poetry ally

  CONTENTS

  Mujer sin vergüenza

  Tea Dance, Provincetown, 1982

  Creed

  At Fifty I Am Startled to Find I Am in My Splendor

  Remedy for Social Overexposure

  Never Mention to the Daughters of the Republic of Texas

  K-Mart, San Antonio, Texas, 1986

  Smith’s Supermarket, Taos, New Mexico, at the Fifteen-Items-or-Less Checkout Line

  Noche, La Casa Magdalena, Lamy, New Mexico

  After a Quote from My Father

  Wasps in the Buddha Bell

  Calendar in the Season of the Pandemic

  In Case of Emergency

  Instructions for My Funeral

  It Occurs to Me I Am the Creative/Destructive Goddess Coatlicue

  Cielo sin sombrero

  Cielo con sombrero / Sky Wearing a Hat

  Jarcería Shop

  El Jardin, End of Day

  I Should Like to Fall in Love with a Burro Named Saturnino

  Figs

  Neither Señorita nor Señora

  Our Father, Big Chief in Heaven

  This in the News Unmentioned

  El Hombre

  Adelina Cerritos

  Te A—

  A Boy with a Machine Gun Waves to Me

  Tepoztlán

  Señor Martín

  Swallows, Guanajuato Airport

  Cielo sin sombrero / Sky Without a Hat

  Police Blotter, May 5th, 2013, San Miguel de Allende

  Quiero ser maguey en mi próxima vida / I Want to Be a Maguey in My Next Life

  Cantos y llantos

  Back Then or Even Now

  Canto for Women of a Certain Llanto

  Washing My Rebozo by Hand

  Having Recently Escaped from the Maws of a Deathly Life, I Am Ready to Begin the Year Anew

  Four Poems on Aging

  Making Love After Celibacy

  Lullaby

  Instructions for Vigiling the Dying

  Exploding Cigar of Love

  God Breaks the Heart Again and Again Until It Stays Open

  Mrs. Gandhi

  Poem Written at Midnight

  Year of My Near Death

  Letter to Pat Little Dog After Losing Her Son

  Día de los Muertos

  Buen árbol / A Good Tree

  Cisneros sin censura

  Mount Everest

  Variations in White

  In My Little Museum of Erotica

  My Mother and Sex

  Stepping on Shit

  Naranja completa

  You Better Not Put Me in a Poem

  Woman Seeks Her Own Company

  Pilón

  When in Doubt

  Acknowledgments

  Mujer

  sin

  vergüenza

  Tea Dance, Provincetown, 1982

  At the boy bar, no

  one

  danced with me.

  I danced with

  every

  one.

  The entire

  room.

  Every song.

  That’s what was so

  great

  about the boy bars

  then.

  The room vibrated.

  Shook.

  Convulsed.

  In one

  collective

  zoological

  frenzy.

  Truthfully,

  I was the

  only woman

  there.

  Who cared?

  At the Boatslip,

  I was welcomed.

  The girl bar

  down the street?

  Pfft!

  Dull as Brillo.

  But the tea dances shimmied,

  miraculous as mercury.

  Acrid stink of sweat and

  chlorine tang of semen.

  Slippery male energy.

  Something akin to

  watching horses fighting.

  Something exciting.

  My lover,

  the final summer he was bi,

  introduced me to the teas.

  Often hovered out of sight,

  distracted by poolside

  beauties, while I danced

  content/innocent

  with the room of men.

  He was a skittish kite, that one.

  Kites swerve and swoop and whoop.

  Only a matter of time, I knew.

 
Apropos, I called him

  “my little piece of string.”

  And that’s what kites

  leave you with in the end.

  There was an expiration date

  to summer. Understood.

  That season,

  I was experimenting to be

  the woman I wanted to be.

  Taught myself to sun

  topless at the gay beach,

  where sunbathers

  shouted “ranger,”

  a relayed warning

  announcing authority,

  en route on horseback,

  coming to inspect

  if we were clothed.

  Else fined. Fifty

  dollars sans bottom.

  One hundred, topless.

  Fifty a tit, I joked.

  It was easy to be half naked

  at a gay beach. Men

  didn’t bother to look.

  I was in training to be

  a woman without shame.

  Not a shameless woman,

  una sinvergüenza, but

  una sin vergüenza

  glorious in her skin.

  Flesh akin to pride.

  I shed that summer

  not only bikini top but

  guilt-driven Eve and

  self-immolating Fatima.

  Was practicing for

  my Minoan days ahead.

  Medusa hair and breasts

  spectacular as Nike of Samothrace

  welcoming the salty wind.

  Yes, I was a lovely thing then.

  I can say this with impunity.

  At twenty-eight, she was a woman

  unrelated to me. I could

  tell stories. Have so many to tell

  and none to tell them to

  except the page.

  My faithful confessor.

  Lover and I feuded

  one night when he

  wouldn’t come home with me.

  His secret—herpes.

  Laughable in retrospect,

  considering the Plague

  was already decimating dances

  across the globe.

  But that was before

  we knew it as the Plague.

  We were all on the run in ’82.

  Jumping to Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,”

  the summer’s theme song.

  Beat thumping in our blood.

  Drinks sweeter than bodies

  convulsing on the floor.

  Creed

  I believe I am God.

  And you are too.

  And each and everyone.

  But only for a little.

  I believe God is

  Love, and love is God.

  And although some

  Doubt God’s existence,

  No one doubts the existence of love,

  Even and especially those who have

  Never met love.

  I believe we are

  Capable of atrocities beyond

  Imagination and equally

  Capable of extraordinary

  God-acts as well.

  I believe

  There is enough misery

  In the world, but also

  Humanity—just a bit

  More, I believe.

  I believe in the power

  Of a thought, a word,

  To change the world.

  I believe there is no greater

  Sorrow than that of a mother

  Who has lost her child.

  I believe in las madres,

  Las madres de las madres,

  Y la santísima madre,

  La diosa Guadalupe.

  Because the universe is large enough

  To encompass contradictions,

  I believe these same mothers sometimes

  Create monsters—los machos.

  I believe mothers and grandmothers

  Are the solution to violence,

  Not only in Mexico / the United States,

  But across the globe.

  I believe what the generals need now

  Are the abuelita brigades armed with

  Chanclas to shame, swat, and spank

  Los meros machos del mundo.

  Amen.

  At Fifty I Am Startled to Find I Am in My Splendor

  These days I admit

  I am wide as a tule tree.

  My underwear protests.

  And yet,

  I like myself best

  without clothes when

  I can admire myself

  as God made me, still

  divine as a maja.

  Wide as a fertility goddess,

  though infertile. I am,

  as they say,

  in decline. Teeth

  worn down, eyes burning

  yellow. Of belly

  bountiful and flesh

  beneficent I am. I am

  silvering in crags

  of crotch and brow.

  Amusing.

  I am a spectator at my own sport.

  I am Venetian, decaying splendidly.

  Am magnificent beyond measure.

  Lady Pompadour roses exploding

  before death. Not old.

  Correction, aged.

  Passé? I am but vintage.

  I am a woman of a delightful season.

  El Cantarito, little brown jug of la Lotería.

  Solid, stout, bottom planted

  firmly and without a doubt,

  filled to the brim I am.

  I said the brim.

  Remedy for Social Overexposure

  Seek a pirul tree and sit

  beneath immediately.

  Remove from

  ears and tongue,

  words.

  Fast from same.

  Soak in a tub of seclusion.

  Rinse face with wind.

  In extreme cases, douse

  oneself with sky. Then,

  swab gently with clouds.

  Dress in clean, pressed pajamas.

  Preferably white.

  Hold close to the heart,

  chihuahuas. Kiss and

  be kissed by same.

  Consume a cool glass of night.

  Read poetry that inspires poetry.

  Write until temperament

  returns to calm.

  Place moonlight in a bowl.

  Sleep beside and

  dream of white flowers.

  Never Mention to the Daughters of the Republic of Texas

  That you made love

  on an office desk

  on the seventeenth floor

  with a view of the Alamo.

  Saw it upside down.

  Your head dangling

  off the edge of the desk.

  But saw it right for once.

  Shook from memory—

  Bosnia. How neighbor

  upon neighbor fired.

  Grief in one century

  bred in another ire.

  Reason collapsed

  like Stari Most, a bridge

  of five hundred years.

  What do you know

  of tears?

  What you choose

  to remember—

  Beware.

  K-Mart, San Antonio, Texas, 1986

  FOR RUBÉN

  When I can take you to the K-Mart

  on South Santa Rosa at sunset,

  and say, Meet me over by the flip-flops,

  I’ve got to get me some socks.

&
nbsp; When I can toss in the shopping cart

  my tampons next to your Tres Flores

  hair oil, my microwave popcorn, your

  pack of white tees, my San Martín

  de Porres three-day candle.

  When we have finished paying

  and can sit in the parking lot

  satisfied, you and I,

  with nachos and an Icee.

  Then we can marvel

  at a thousand black wings

  swooping against the downtown sky.

  Urracas urracando in the trembling trees.

  Smith’s Supermarket, Taos, New Mexico, at the Fifteen-Items-or-Less Checkout Line

  The baby-faced cholo in front of me

  gently drops a divider bar between

  what’s his and mine.

  On my side, a six-outlet surge

  protector for my computer,

  and a fireproof glass cup

  for my Lux Perpetua candle,

  a votive so powerful

  it self-destructs.

  On his,

  a plastic bottle of store-brand vodka.

  It’s noon, but somewhere

  it’s happy hour.

  Baseball cap bad-ass backwards.

  Black leather from neck to knees.

  One brow and ear stitched with silver.

  And on his neck, “Rufina” in wispy

  ink I would kiss if I could. Fool,

  it takes one to know one.

  I drive away wondering

  if Rufina is helping him

  drink his bottle of forget.

  Or if it’s she who is regret.

  I write till the dark descends.

  My cell warm tonight.

  Candles. Copal.

  Outside my window,

  mountain without a moon.

  Buddha in lotus.

  Silent and still.

  By ten, hot bath, lavender salts.

  Flannel buttoned to the neck.

  Am certain Rufina is not

  as happy as I am tonight,

  in bed with my love,

  a book.

  Noche, La Casa Magdalena, Lamy, New Mexico

  FOR SUSAN AND BERT

  i.

  All night,

  wind rattles

  at my door

  like an over-

  sexed lover

  wanting in.

  ii.

  Yellow

  flowers

  in your

  Guada-

  lupe

  nicho

  remem-

  ber when

  they were

  wild.