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    We Borrowed Gentleness
    We Borrowed Gentleness
    We Borrowed Gentleness
    Ebook97 pages29 minutes

    We Borrowed Gentleness

    By J. Estanislao Lopez

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    About this ebook

    We Borrowed Gentleness interrogates the innateness of pain and forms of destruction—through natural disaster, through God, through family, and through the power structures and patriarchal violence that embeds itself in language and cultural memory. Poems critique and challenge the patriarchal narratives that dominate American history. 

    The poems leave the question open of whether man, men, a father and son, are redeemable after the surge of rising white nationalism in America. And yet, there are poems that find, still, bits of joy and perhaps a shred of hope.

    By juxtaposing poems of louder narrative imagination with quieter poems that explore intimate failings within a family, often portrayed with a realist aesthetic, the book attempts to work through the essential fault in man, in men—in the structures that they design and maintain.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAlice James Books
    Release dateOct 9, 2022
    ISBN9781948579377
    We Borrowed Gentleness

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      Book preview

      We Borrowed Gentleness - J. Estanislao Lopez

      A METAPHOR

      You raise a glass of iced water to your lips.

      Feeling a strange touch,

      you look into the glass to find

      a dead gnat floating at the surface.

      There are metaphors everywhere

      for the presence of evil.

      But metaphors are misread.

      Too late, you learn

      that evil is not signified by the gnat,

      a casualty, but by the water,

      which we raise to our lips every single day.

      INDEPENDENCE DAY IN WEST TEXAS

      Bought with the soiled coins

      I pinched from the floorboard of our father’s truck,

      my sister’s sparkler fell into her sandal.

      Below her body,

      light pooled against desert night—

      a coincidence of beauty and suffering,

      which I would learn is an old coincidence.

      Old, too, a boy’s hands placed

      on the causal chain.

      My mother smothered the glowing lace,

      first with her hands,

      then with a towel my brother fetched.

      Fireworks continued.

      Horned lizards skittered beneath wood pallets.

      I sunk behind our Dodge, and, as my sister cried out

      to a luminous sky I then believed was listening,

      I buried my legs in gravel,

      counting seconds between its shifts of hue.

      After the fireworks, gunfire resounded,

      continuing through my sleep. I dreamt explosions

      turning milky, flooding the desert,

      saturating it—

      our feet steeped in the milk, my sister’s and mine

      together. Then, others’ feet: our countrymen,

      who pledged this precise disaster:

      that for her woundedness she’d be remembered,

      for her woundedness she’d be loved.

      LITTLE WORDS

      Every year, the script of hatred

      grows more legible inside me.

      I can feel the letters’ edges

      harden into a strange cartilage.

      Sold off for marriage at the age of thirteen,

      my great-grandmother never said

      that she hated her father,

      who wed their survival

      to her mouth’s conscription.

      My mother, in retelling the story, recommits to it.

      There were the breadlines, the suicides.

      Misery grows on an inverted tree—

      its perfume releasing

      with each broken husk of family.

      Take view of my mother who could never escape my father.

      Take view of my great-grandmother’s crucifix,

      which she prayed beneath,

      and beneath the surface of her prayer

      was a hatred of God, unutterable, so passed down quietly like a gene.

      Take view of the spurs on those little words,

      Te amo, I love you,

      and test their prick, whetted by contradiction,

      on your own tongue.

      Ask how much taking is enough.

      THE CONTRACT

      He had shaken our hands earlier on the jobsite,

      but now would not pay my father for our work.

      Through the truck’s open window, my right ear

      caught the steely whistle of a passing train’s friction

      against the rails, while my left listened to my father

      dial a number repeatedly. A broken air conditioner

      blew lukewarm air into the hot cab. This wasn’t

      his first time being cheated, nor would it be the last.

      That smile with which the contractor met me, how

      securely fastened it seemed to its frame—his hand’s

      warmth, liver spots a constellation full

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