My Wicked Wicked Ways: Poems Read online

  Sandra Cisneros

  MY WICKED WICKED WAYS

  Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954. Internationally acclaimed for her poetry and fiction, which has been translated into more than twenty languages, she has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Lannan Literary Award, the American Book Award, and the Thomas Wolfe Prize, and of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacArthur Foundation. Cisneros is the author of two novels, The House on Mango Street and Caramelo; a collection of short stories, Woman Hollering Creek; two books of poetry, My Wicked Wicked Ways and Loose Woman; a children’s book, Hairs/Pelitos; a selected anthology of her own work, Vintage Cisneros; and, with Ester Hernández, Have You Seen Marie?, a fable for adults. She is the founder of the Macondo Foundation, an association of writers united to serve underserved communities. Find her online at www.sandracisneros.com.

  ALSO BY SANDRA CISNEROS

  Caramelo

  Woman Hollering Creek

  The House on Mango Street

  Loose Woman (poetry)

  Hairs/Pelitos (for young readers)

  Vintage Cisneros

  Have You Seen Marie? (with Ester Hernández)

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, APRIL 2015

  Copyright © 1987 by Sandra Cisneros

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto. Previously published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in paperback by Third Woman Press, Berkeley, California, in 1987, and in hardcover by Turtle Bay Books, New York, in 1992.

  Vintage and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Some of these poems have appeared previously in Bad Boys, Nuestro, Revista Chicano-Riqueña, Quarterly West, Prairie Voices, The Spoon River Quarterly, Mango, Third Woman, Banyan Anthology 2, Ecos, Imagine, and Contact II.

  Permissions acknowledgments are available here.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Cisneros, Sandra.

  My wicked wicked ways / Sandra Cisneros.

  p. cm

  I. Title

  PS3553.I78M9 1992 811′.54—dc20 92-14852

  Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9781101872505

  eBook ISBN 9781101872512

  eBook design adapted from printed book design by Anne Scatto

  Cover design by Cecile Brune

  Cover painting: La Panchanela con Acordión y Bailadora by Terry Ybañez, from the collection of Robin Teague.

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v4.1

  a

  Tarde o temprano,

  for Rubén

  PREFACE

  “I can live alone and I love to work.”—MARY CASSATT

  “Allí está el detalle.”*—CANTINFLAS

  Gentlemen, ladies. If you please—these

  are my wicked poems from when.

  The girl grief decade. My wicked nun

  years, so to speak. I sinned.

  Not in the white-woman way.

  Not as Simone voyeuring the pretty

  slum city on a golden arm. And no,

  not wicked like the captain of the bad

  boy blood, that Hollywood hoodlum

  who boozed and floozed it up,

  hell-bent on self-destruction. Not me.

  Well. Not much. Tell me,

  how does a woman who.

  A woman like me. Daughter of

  a daddy with a hammer and blistered feet

  he’d dip into a washtub while he ate his dinner.

  A woman with no birthright in the matter.

  What does a woman inherit

  that tells her how

  to go?

  My first felony—I took up with poetry.

  For this penalty, the rice burned.

  Mother warned I’d never wife.

  Wife? A woman like me

  whose choice was rolling pin or factory.

  An absurd vice, this wicked wanton

  writer’s life.

  I chucked the life

  my father’d plucked for me.

  Leapt into the salamander fire.

  A girl who’d never roamed

  beyond her father’s rooster eye.

  Winched the door with poetry and fled.

  For good. And grieved I’d gone

  when I was so alone.

  In my kitchen, in the thin hour,

  a calendar Cassatt chanted:

  Repeat after me—

  I can live alone and I love to…

  What a crock. Each week, the ritual grief.

  That decade of the knuckled knocks.

  I took the crooked route and liked my badness.

  Played at mistress.

  Tattooed an ass.

  Lapped up my happiness from a glass.

  It was something, at least.

  I hadn’t a clue.

  What does a woman

  willing to invent herself

  at twenty-two or twenty-nine

  do? A woman with no who nor how.

  And how was I to know what was unwise.

  I wanted to be writer. I wanted to be happy.

  What’s that? At twenty. Or twenty-nine.

  Love. Baby. Husband.

  The works. The big palookas of life.

  Wanting and not wanting.

  Take your hands off me.

  I left my father’s house

  before the brothers,

  vagabonded the globe

  like a rich white girl.

  Got a flat.

  I paid for it. I kept it clean.

  Sometimes the silence frightened me.

  Sometimes the silence blessed me.

  It would come get me.

  Late at night.

  Open like a window,

  hungry for my life.

  I wrote when I was sad.

  The flat cold.

  When there was no love—

  new, old—

  to distract me.

  No six brothers

  with their Fellini racket.

  No mother, father,

  with their wise I told you.

  I tell you,

  these are the pearls

  from that ten-year itch,

  my jewels, my colicky kids

  who fussed and kept

  me up the wicked nights

  when all I wanted was…

  With nothing in the texts to tell me.

  But that was then,

  The who-I-was who would become the who-I-am.

  These poems are from that hobbled when.

  11TH OF JUNE, 1992

  Hydra, Greece

  * * *

  * (Roughly translated: There’s the rub.)

  Funding for completion of this manuscript was provided in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, for which I am grateful. I would also like to express my gratitude to the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas Institute of Letters for their generosity and support of my work. Finally, my sincerest thanks to editor Norma Alarcón for faith and, above all, patience.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Sandra Cisneros

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  I • 1200 South/2100 West

  Velorio

  Sir James South Side

  South Sangamon

  Abuelito Who

  Arturo Burro
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  Mexican Hat Dance

  Good Hotdogs

  Muddy Kid Comes Home

  I Told Susan Reyna

  Twister Hits Houston

  Curtains

  Joe

  Traficante

  II • My Wicked Wicked Ways

  My Wicked Wicked Ways

  Six Brothers

  Mariela

  Josie Bliss

  I the Woman

  Something Crazy

  In a redneck bar down the street

  Love Poem #1

  The blue dress

  The Poet Reflects on Her Solitary Fate

  His Story

  III • Other Countries

  Letter to Ilona from the South of France

  Ladies, South of France—Vence

  December 24th, Paris—Notre-Dame

  Beautiful Man—France

  Postcard to the Lace Man—The Old Market, Antibes

  Letter to Jahn Franco—Venice

  To Cesare, Goodbye

  Ass

  Trieste—Ciao to Italy

  Peaches—Six in a Tin Bowl, Sarajevo

  Hydra Night—House on Fire

  Hydra Coming Down in Rain

  Fishing Calamari by Moon

  Moon in Hydra

  One Last Poem for Richard

  For a Southern Man

  IV • The Rodrigo Poems

  A woman cutting celery

  Sensuality Plunging Barefoot Into Thorns

  Valparaiso

  I understand it as a kiss

  For All Tuesday Travelers

  No Mercy

  The world without Rodrigo

  Rodrigo Returns to the Land and Linen Celebrates

  Beatrice

  Rodrigo de Barro

  Rodrigo in the Dark

  The So-and-So’s

  Monsieur Mon Ami

  Drought

  By Way of Explanation

  Amé, Amo, Amaré

  Men Asleep

  New Year’s Eve

  14 de julio

  Tantas Cosas Asustan, Tantas

  Permissions

  1200 SOUTH/2100 WEST

  I’ve stayed in the front yard all my life.

  I want a peek at the back

  Where it’s rough and untended and hungry weed grows.

  A girl gets sick of a rose.

  —GWENDOLYN BROOKS

  Velorio

  You laughing Lucy

  and she calls us in

  your mother

  Rachel me you I remember

  and the living room dark

  for our eyes to get used to

  That was the summer Lucy remember

  we played on the back

  porch where rats hid under

  And bad boys passed to look

  and look at us and we look back

  Lucy think how it was

  Rachel me you

  we fresh from sun and dirty

  the living room pink

  The paint chipped blue beneath

  so bright for our eyes

  to get used to and in rows and rows

  The kitchen chairs facing front

  where in a corner is a satin box

  with a baby in it

  Who is your sister Lucy

  your mama not crying

  saying stay pray to Jesus

  That baby in a box like a valentine

  and I thinking it is wrong

  us in our raw red ankles

  And mosquito legs

  Rachel wanting to go back out again

  you sticking one dirty finger in

  Said cold cold the living

  room pink Lucy and your hair

  smelling sharp like corn

  Sir James South Side

  Sugar Rat the sweet-lipped one

  says he will love her like no other

  Genuine Forever and She—He is insane

  Though gang love is true love

  and I no jousting brother

  a wild mouth is crazy and bad aim

  I play the game straight

  don’t go looking for trouble

  not capping nor the heart’s high bail

  no sir I say just party in peace

  to all people that walk by or ride

  South Sangamon

  We wake up

  and it’s him

  banging and banging

  and the doorknob rattling open up.

  His drunk cussing,

  her name all over the hallway

  and my name mixed in.

  He yelling from the other side open

  and she yelling from this side no.

  A long time of this

  and we saying nothing

  just hoping he’d get tired and go.

  Then the whole door shakes

  like his big foot meant to break it.

  Then quiet

  so we figured he’d gone.

  That day he punched her belly

  the whole neighborhood watching

  that was Tuesday.

  So this time we lock it.

  And just when we got those kids quiet,

  and me, I shut my eyes again,

  she laughing,

  her cigarette lit,

  just then

  the big rock comes in.

  Abuelito Who

  Abuelito who throws coins like rain

  and asks who loves him

  who is dough and feathers

  who is a watch and glass of water

  whose hair is made of fur

  is too sad to come downstairs today

  who tells me in Spanish you are my diamond

  who tells me in English you are my sky

  whose little eyes are string

  can’t come out to play

  sleeps in his little room all night and day

  who used to laugh like the letter k

  is sick

  is a doorknob tied to a sour stick

  is tired shut the door

  doesn’t live here anymore

  is hiding underneath the bed

  who talks to me inside my head

  is blankets and spoons and big brown shoes

  who snores up and down up and down up and down again

  is the rain on the roof that falls like coins

  asking who loves him

  who loves him who?

  Arturo Burro

  Jacinto el pinto

  Maria tortilla

  Agustín es zonzo

  tin tan tan

  and we hide

  yeah we hide

  we got Arturo

  inside inside

  my brother

  who spins his eyes

  Mama says nothing

  she never says nothing

  Papa makes us promise to lie

  3 kids we got remember it

  but we got Arturo inside

  He moves slow

  like an elephant goes

  and spits and spits

  and never cries

  and won’t grow old

  and won’t grow old

  my brother who spins his eyes

  Mexican Hat Dance

  Crash the record came down on your head.

  Your were trying to dance the Mexican hat dance.

  The black disc on the floor and your shiny feet

  taping this way and then over that.

  So you missed. So you’re a lousy dancer.

  Your mother, never amused by your jokes,

  besides, it was her favorite record—Lucha Villa,

  the lady who sings with tears in her throat,

  picks it up and cracks it over your head.

  Come out of that bathroom.

  No, I’m never coming out!

  Good Hotdogs

  For Kiki

  Fifty cents apiece

  To eat our lunch

  We’d run

  Straight from school

  Instead of home

  Two blocks


  Then the store

  That smelled like steam

  You ordered

  Because you had the money

  Two hotdogs and two pops for here

  Everything on the hotdogs

  Except pickle lily

  Dash those hotdogs

  Into buns and splash on

  All that good stuff

  Yellow mustard and onions

  And french fries piled on top all

  Rolled up in a piece of wax

  Paper for us to hold hot

  In our hands

  Quarters on the counter

  Sit down

  Good hotdogs

  We’d eat

  Fast till there was nothing left

  But salt and poppy seeds even

  The little burnt tips

  Of french fries

  We’d eat

  You humming

  And me swinging my legs

  Muddy Kid Comes Home

  And Mama complains

  Mama whose motto

  Is mud must remain

  Mama who acts

  So uppity up

  Says mud can’t come in

  Says mud must stay put

  Mama who thinks that

  Mud is uncouth

  Cannot remember

  Can hardly recall

  Mud’s what I was

  When I wasn’t at all

  But mud must remain

  Or Mama complains

  Mama who cannot

  Remember her name

  I Told Susan Reyna

  I told Susan Reyna

  I don’t like her

  because she’s fat and ugly

  and she wears big brassieres

  and smells like chocolate candy

  and comes in late each morning

  with her tongue puff puffing

  and her wrinkled blouse

  half in half out

  and who probably stole

  Walter Milky’s money