Please welcome new contributor ESTEBAN RODRÍGUEZ.
In LOTERÍA—which draws its form from the Mexican game of chance yet manages to convey a sense of inevitability with every line—Esteban Rodríguez presents intimate and compassionate portraits of family members. Among the most vivid are those of his father, whose crossing of the desert is imagined in kaleidoscopic, multivalent sequences both harrowing and hallucinatory, and his mother, whose high spirits and physical sufferings are vividly reconstructed and turned for moving insights. Deeply companionable, offered in a voice that is simultaneously energetic and guided by confident restraint, these poems are full of love and clarity, an uncommon and welcome combination.
—John Hennessy, Poetry Editor
34 El soldado
2007
March, but summer’s heat
already occupies the air.
And in the middle of the yard
seated in the middle of your uncles,
aunts, your cousin smiles, babysits
a Bud Light because he can,
because nineteen is just a number,
and his deployment is near.
“Nineteen,” your uncle jokes,
“and already you get to travel
the world,” and because he knows
that that world is filled with promises
of IEDs, ambushes, shrapnel
and severed limbs, he adds,
“We’re proud of you, mijo, proud
of what you’re about to do.”
But you wonder if you can be proud
of him too, if after accepting, without
question, what it means to invade
a country, you can accept he’s a year
older than you, that your body
is no different than his, that in
a few months, while he’s trudging
through rubble and sand, taking
position in a bombed-out house,
you’ll be walking a new campus,
hopeful that at the end of each class,
you’re one step closer to figuring
the world out.
20 El pájaro
And as he treks farther into this scalded
stretch of earth, weaving through clumps
of matted hide, heaps of broken bone,
your father spots a dead bird, believing,
at first, that it’s nothing more than another
lifeless thing, until he comes closer, kneels
before it, and after wiping the sweat searing
his brow and eyelids, sees a key between
its ribs, small but shiny, and if not a sign,
your father thinks, then an opportunity,
one placed here by God or whatever god
demonstrates love with symbols and mysteries,
with the hope that as men like your father
seek a new land, a door will appear,
and they will no longer have to pray
for miracles, no longer beg for salvation
on their knees.
4 El cartrín
There was an uncle for everything:
dirty jokes, conspiracies, drunken
monologues at barbecues and birthday parties.
And there was Tío Roy, who, no matter
the gathering, dressed in bright polos,
seashell necklaces, bleached jeans
and boots made to walk Italian plazas.
Yes, this was the uncle who doused
his body in cologne, kept his shades on
at night, and who didn’t care when his back
was turned and everyone—uncles, aunts,
cousins old enough to have earned an opinion—
gave a look that said how he dressed
was too much, that he wore his “happiness”
on his sleeve, not out of any sense to spread
his well-being, but out of his attempt to thrust
all of who he was in their faces, to make
his business theirs, to remind them,
despite their most silent objections,
that what makes anyone uncomfortable
never lives for long at a distance.
48 La chalupa
For once, it’s not about your mother,
father, not about deserts or exoduses
to other countries, but about you
and this canoe, about a river you find
yourself in, a moment where you stop
paddling, and in order to undergo
an “experience,” look at the horizon,
let the eager sunlight bathe you,
let your skin, still scarred in old
adjectives, shine with new descriptions,
and let your body welcome whatever
emotion you think you’ll soon feel,
because there is no one around you,
because history is raging somewhere
on shore, and because you accept,
for once, that whatever future lies ahead
was and will never be yours to control.
Esteban Rodríguez is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Ordinary Bodies (Word West Press, 2021), and the essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us (Split/Lip Press, 2021). His poems and reviews have appeared in New England Review, The Gettysburg Review, Colorado Review, West Branch, The Adroit Journal, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He is interviews editor for the EcoTheo Review, associate poetry editor for AGNI, and a senior book reviews editor for Tupelo Quarterly. He lives with his family in south Texas.
