Author: dianarenee

...a writer and poet who left the traditional Mennonite community of Lancaster, Pennsylvania and resides in Costa Rica.

Short Hair Like Boys (from “When The Roll Is Called A Pyonder”)

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(from When The Roll Is Called A Pyonder, release date: August 19, 2014 by eLectio Publsihing.)

*****

Mommy washes our hair on Saturdays so it will be clean for church.  Me and Wanda have long hair and Mommy has to wash it because we can’t.

I don’t like it when Mommy washes my hair.  Sometimes I cry.  She washes me with pink soap in the bathtub and then I have to turn around so the water is coming out behind me.  The water is coming out and she pushes me over backwards until my hair is under the spigot and my hair gets heavy and my head feels like it’s going to fall off.  Then I can sit up and Mommy puts shampoo on my head.  She scratches it all around with her fingers.  She does it hard and it hurts.  I ask Mommy does she have to do it with her fingernails? She says Oh Honey I’m Not Using My Fingernails, I Just Use My Fingers.  Then she doesn’t scratch quite as hard anymore until next time.

When it’s time to rinse the shampoo out she makes me put my head back under the water again.  I get to put a washcloth over my eyes so shampoo doesn’t get in them.  Water is splashing all over my face and my nose tickles and I can’t see and I can’t breathe.  Mommy rubs out the shampoo and I have to hold my head up and I can’t hold it up anymore.  But if I sit up I get in trouble and if I put my head back the whole way all the water goes in my nose and mouth.  I wish we could have short hair like boys but the Bible says we can’t. It’s not fair but we have to obey it.

After bath, Daddy combs us.  Daddy always says our hair is pretty and it smells good like shampoo.  He says I Smell ‘Poo for shampoo and we laugh because we aren’t allowed to say that word.  Daddy can say it though when he means shampoo.  If Mommy hears him say it she says Lamar and looks at him out of the top of her eyes.

In the summer Daddy takes the blue comb and sits on the porch and combs out the tangles.  I wear my Noah’s Ark jammies.  We listen to the peepers and Daddy tells me about animals like peepers that are really little frogs and about fish that live in the pond and bumblebees that live in nests and worms that live in the dirt.  He tells me stories about when he was a little boy.  In the winter we can’t sit outside, we have to sit inside and me and Daddy watch Hee Haw on tv while he combs me.  People on that program talk funny and they walk around in the cornfield and Miss Minnie forgot to take the tag off her hat.  Mommy doesn’t like Hee Haw and she doesn’t like Daddy to watch it, or us.  She says it’s too dumb and she tries to wash our hair during it so we can’t watch.

Everything But the Words / Todo Menos las Palabras

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(The same poem first in  English, then in Spanish because I try to pick my favorite one and I can only pick both)

i remember the night you
borrowed flavio’s blue car
the bottom halves of trees i
could see through the
window where
we stopped along the
dusty road

what did we say to
each other
that night i
remember it all but
the words

* * * * *

recuerdo la noche en que
prestaste el coche azul de flavio
los troncos de los árboles que
veía por la
ventana donde
paramos en el
camino polvoroso

qué nos dijimos
esa noche yo lo
recuerdo todo menos
las palabras

(from Tell Me About The Telaraña, 2012)

The Same Boots

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The headline says, “Nicaraguense Muere Atropellado” but they don’t give a name or show a face. There are policemen in the photo, a dented car, a man’s legs on the ground, cut off by the photo frame. There must be a thousand Nicaraguan men in this city and one of them failed to look both ways.  I start to turn the page and then I see the boots.

I feel my heart seize and the shock wave goes through me to my fingers and toes.

Those are his boots.
No, they’re not.
We bought them in the market in Rivas.
No, they’re not.

I look as hard as I can at the photograph. I hold it closer. I hold it farther away.

The buckles are different.
No, they’re not.
The strap is different.

The truth is I can’t really see the buckle or the strap.

“No identificado,” it says, “en Bajada Grande.”

Why would he have been in Bajada Grande?
It’s a free country.
He doesn’t even know anyone in Bajada Grande.
Those are his boots.

I would know. I didn’t want to buy them for him. They were so expensive; so much more than what he really needed. But he wanted them. He tried them on and said they were perfect. And they were really gorgeous black boots. They made him look sexier than ever. I wanted to say, “It’s too much, amor. This money is all I have and it seems like so much to you but it is nothing. Nothing. I have to get on a plane and fly away. I have to go places and do things and I’m not really your wife or even your girlfriend. I’m using you.” I bought him the boots.

I didn’t buy him those boots to die in them.
They’re not the same boots. They’re different.
You can’t prove they are.
You can’t prove they aren’t.

My God I never wanted to see him again. He stalked me, pursued me, terrified me. But I didn’t want him to die in the street atropellado with his boots on. I wanted him to wear the soles through dancing with girls young and beautiful as he.

Is he dead?
Is the city safe, now, for me?
Can I stop walking with my head down between bus stops?
Glancing over my shoulder to see I’m not being followed?

I am dizzy.

Say what you want, I know those boots.
They’re not the same boots.
Is he really gone? Am I safe now?
You’re paranoid.

I don’t know which voice I want to be right and which I want to be wrong.

All I know is that I know those boots.
They’re not the same boots.

Glass Windows

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trapped inside
i stare through glass windows
at the sky
separated
from the sun and rain

i would give my life
to be a leaf
making sugar from sunshine
even only for a season

i would be a bee, my
face buried in flowers and
let winter kill me
once and for all
when it comes,
dissolve my little wings
in its rain that
taps chilly fingers against
glass windows

Daniel

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Daniel hates to work. Every day he throws back his head and laughs, says he’s celebrating El Día de San Pepino. El santo de los perezosos, he says.

A woman will kill him someday. His first wife didn’t succeed but sooner or later a less frightened one will; his first wife was a child. Daniel awakened to find 14-year-old Susana holding a butcher knife to his throat, but she was too afraid to push it in. He laughs about the wild times he had while she waited for him at home. That was back when he’d won the lottery and for two years he had it all—money, a motorcycle, a young wife.

Daniel always laughs. He lives with his mamá and he shrugs. Things didn’t work out.

Daniel, él que dice que se casa el treinta de febrero. Daniel, who can win and lose and never notice the game.

Furniture (from “The Riotous Walls”)

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(From The Riotous Walls, unpublished short novel)

Furniture, it turns out, is a luxury. You don’t need it to survive. Of course rooms look better with things in them, but our economic problems out-shouted the aesthetic ones. Between the four of us, we owned a mountain of cardboard boxes, one fan, four lamps, two clocks and a total of six single mattresses, all stolen from the college dorm. I don’t know how we got too many. Beth and I took two, threw them on our floor and pushed them together to make one big bed. Nina and Sheila too two, threw them on their floor and pushed them to opposite sides of the room. They were friends, but not best friends like Beth and me. The two leftovers went into the Passion Pit. We would have had to wear our clothes of out of the cardboard boxes if the rooms hadn’t included closets with shelves.

The only piece of furniture that came with the apartment was The Desk. The living room boasted a Desk so immense and so Heavy that it could only have been assembled in that very room. No human being could have gotten it up the precarious stairs and even God couldn’t have gotten it through the door. We could have used it as a table had we owned a chair. As it were, we put Sheila’s ancient stereo on it and stashed things in its drawers. I guess we could have painted furniture on the walls. In the end, it’s probably the only thing we didn’t paint on them.

. . .

Beth rode the couch, lounging like Queen Bathsheba, the day Mark and Curtis carried it to us. Tony Royal, or friend the cafeteria thief, said we could have it when he graduated he left town forever. It’s not the kind of thing you would take with you. You would, in fact, feel fortunate if you were able to give it away. It was a furry stained nursing-home pink and had offensive sprung springs but you could lay, sit or stand on it. You could lose things in it or under it. But it was our only piece of furniture which made it as hard to hate as it was to love.

I can’t believe Beth had the nerve to lie on it all the way home. I would never do that. But then again, I weigh a lot more than she does. That’s the effect Beth has on men; they happily carry her a mile in the summer sun while she lies on a couch. Me; not exactly.

When the day finally came to remove it, we didn’t carry it down the precarious stairway to the street as carefully as we carried it up. We hauled it to the door and threw it off the porch. It crashed to the ground and then we set it on fire. The neighbor man who hates us called the police so we had to say it was an accident.

That was a great idea. It was much easier to throw away after it was all burned up.

blue blankets

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she wants grandchildren,
dreams of our bellies
swelling with babies –
her inexplicable daughters
safely sealed in matrimony
and we get cats
get dogs

she sees my first wrinkle
with panic
her time runs out with mine

shall I cut paper hands
for my poems?
pin the pages of stories
to dolls she can hold?
shall I name my notebooks, wrap them in
blue blankets,
bounce them on my hip and
sing them songs?

(an old poem from sometime before my nieces and nephews were born to partially absolve me,  but the questions remain.)