by Holly Iglesias
Student to his professor, I knew no response to you’re quite lovely besides oh and that vague nod with which the young surrender control over their bodies. He fed me kumquats and Dubonnet, recounting his time overseas in the service, springtime of the Cold War, when crew-cuts and confessional poets were in vogue. He had returned home with three children and a French wife who divorced him after the birth of three more, a woman whose life inside a lime-green shotgun house near the Plum Street Snowball stand seemed full of charm. I envied her alien status, her facility with garlic, her French-speaking children who stayed with their father every other weekend, eating peaches in heavy syrup as he tapped at the typewriter, tipsy. He heaped gifts upon me—pocket dictionaries, amphetamines, paperback editions of Rimbaud and Valéry—until I had the vocabulary of a budding symboliste, a satchel of words I would carry onto the trains of Europe, roaming with yet another of the century’s lost generations. He released me after graduation into the world, insisting I see France, subsist on Médoc reds and foil-wrapped wedges of La Vache qui Rit, read Le Fleurs du Mal on a bench by the Tuileries basin until I too swooned in poetry’s drunken boat. It was difficult to say if he lost me or I lost him, but torrid verse continued to haunt my chastened life as did the cheese, which I tucked each day into my daughter’s Star Wars lunch box, the red cow with the gypsy earrings still laughing.
She ate the cake whole, making of her mouth the hold of a cargo ship a few days out of Havana. Though she sailed the warm blues of the Caribbean, she dreamt of the Bosporus' cinnamon, salt, sweat, ash, sigh. Tattered, her blue gingham skirt wept, washing the bottom half of her body clean of regret. She went by Nance, a name easy to rhyme and easier to forget as it echoed out from deck to mast then wafted away on the westerlies. Cuba was a constant point of departure, the counterpoise of destination, an airy confection of conjecture. But oh how her dreams wandered, betraying themselves, countering destiny with a will of their own, like the Furies biding time underground, alchemizing rage into a mirthquake of madness.
He once loved the thrifty woman, the one who made yogurt and hung bandanas in the windows for curtains. For years, they sat in harmony at a card table with their children and ate lentils and carrot sticks. Did she know that his affection for such food and for her was merely a way to bide his time? Should she have been surprised, when affluence finally visited them, that he would turn? In the tenth year of their marriage, outside a movie theater in an ungentrified, soon to be Miami-Viced Miami Beach, he declared that Conan the Barbarian was his new favorite movie, displacing Rocky, which to her had seemed bloody yet innocuous, just another endearing underdog tale. She had long played Adrian to his Rocky, encouraging him, binding his wounds, wearing a beret and a schlubby coat. But Conan, starring an even more alarmingly muscled man, reveled in slaughter and the conquest of women scantily dressed in hides, suggesting expectations of athleticism and near nudity and large quantities of red meat. The night he set up tray tables in front of their new TV for the family to eat dinner while watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, she aspirated a broccoli floret, mercifully losing consciousness as the host touted the delights of champagne wishes and caviar dreams.
Holly Iglesias' work includes three collections of poetry:Sleeping Things (Press 53), Angles of Approach (White Pine Press) and Souvenirs of a Shrunken World(Kore Press)—and a critical work, Boxing Inside the Box: Women's Prose Poetry (Quale Press). In addition, she has translated the work of Cuban poet Caridad Atencio. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Iglesias has taught in the Master of Liberal Arts and Sciences Program of the University of North Carolina-Asheville and in the MFA Program in Creative Writing Program at the University of Miami.