our own making fiction, poetry, photography, and collage
by Ana Paula Pinto Diaz
for my family, the beginning of everything. for Lily, through it all forever. and for Paul, for showing me life and poetry are one and the same.
“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it” — George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
Part 1 Origins
Last Days of a Volcano In our last days we lived as fugitives. When the neighbor’s parrot showed up dead on our doorstep my mother knew it was time to go, although she had been expecting it for a long time. The first time, it was a cat, its head torn from its body by our dogs and left to rot in the sun beside the front gate of our driveway. The second, when all the caterpillars on the dill bush appeared dead one morning, shrinking and covered in dew. The parrot was the third and the last. My mother dreamed of this before it ever began and in the later days she often woke in fear. Because of this, much of what we owned had been in boxes for years: in the corners of bedrooms, the pantry, the garage, locked up so that we forgot half of it ever existed. I had asked her, many times, why, and she always responded that we would go soon; that it would not be that much longer. The days of riots and half-whispered tales of violence frightened me, although I did not, at the time, find any meaning in it. At six years old I watched my mother learn to fire a double-barreled shotgun and sleep with it under her bed each night. It was like that: years of my childhood permeated by a sense that we were always ready to run. — In first grade my school was shut down by protests. With nothing else to do under lockdown, we sat in rows outside our classrooms and discussed average things, like the funny way our teacher said things in English. We waited, sipping water, taking turns to cry or go to the bathroom. I heard they were using tear gas and imagined the world outside like one big, grey explosion. We hardly understood what any of it meant. My mother, upon hearing the news, had my grandmother drive her to the nearest barricaded street and then walked through all of it—police beatings, clusters of people crying on the streets, blood and water—the rest of the way, just far enough from the gas that it didn’t touch her. Although she found me trembling, I had not been quite afraid because I knew she would come. It made no sense, in my world as I knew it, that anything could keep her away. And even though my father had died when I was only two, it never occured to me that she likewise inhabited any state of mortality. Once she found my brothers and I, the four of us took a cab down to where my grandmother waited behind the barricade in her dark green van. At red lights, my grandmother crossed herself and prayed, the same words passing her lips over and over in whispers. She was not Catholic or particularly religious, but she prayed often. Like my mother she had known dreams and visions
almost all of her life; lived under the weight and luck of it. That day I know they would have taken every child home if they could: the only ones who braved the riots to find us before the violence subsided later that night. — It happened in my ninth year. Preparing to leave the country, when we finally did, was like preparing for a funeral before the person was dead. The bedrooms emptied out and dusted; the lawyers my mother met in secret; the little crease between her eyebrows that seemed to become permanent; the endless whispering. My mother’s brother, like a father to us, left the family hacienda for good. That land, where we learned to love the earth so deeply and so well, had been in our family for centuries. For my brothers and I, as for our mother and her brothers before us, it was akin to the beginning of life. Within a few months it was sold, although the acres of oil palms knew no difference. Even beyond the tangible, this time was marked by the sense that something, or someone, was to be lost for good. It was hard to tell if we were leaving the country or if it was leaving us: there was such a deep sense of abandonment, but I couldn’t tell if the core of it was in me or the dormant volcano that held our whole lives in its lap. Cotopaxi: shining peak. Although, more often than not, those days it appeared dull and somber behind rain clouds. Years before, at the very edges of my memory, a smaller volcano on the outskirts of the capital had blown, leaving a thin layer of ashes over everything for miles. The year we left, the volcano was quiet but the people grew uneasy. The city rumbled not with the threat of ashes, but with restlessness and hunger. Both times it was grey and full of smog. Tucked into a merciless landscape, ravaged by poverty and corruption, we felt our home coming undone as a slowly rotting plum: the surface still intact, the center growing softer and darker with each passing day. I dreamt, seven times, that as we sat in our garden surrounded by fruit, the iron gates were thrown open by a stampede of wild animals. I always forced myself awake before I could die, trampled by an ox or mauled by a mountain lion. — My mother was a math teacher, but she had been born an artist. This became most apparent to me in the weeks before leaving. In those days she made trips to artisan stands and antique shops, collecting art like she could gather up the soul of the country in bits of gold leaf and cast iron. The home of her entire life she would carry with her in tiny mirrors and statuettes: gilded frames, ceramics, the body of the Virgen rendered six inches tall. For us, she said, these would be reminders—an origin story wrapped neatly in day-old newspapers, packed tightly in boxes.
Years later, a living room erected like a colonial church altar, thousands of miles from our beginnings. We returned to one particular shop often then, days which had a feeling of age and antiquity I could never explain. The wood and dust breathed into me a sense that time, between those walls, was fragmented. Imaginary. I had lived a hundred different lives and they were all happening at once. The box, I found on the shelf of a mahogany ceramics cabinet in a corner in the back. It was simple—a delicate brocade of blues and greens on a grey background, it’s lid fastened down with a little plastic button that looked almost like a fang. Inside it was covered with a silky, pearl colored lining. Holding it was like trying to remember a dream that has just slipped from your memory. I felt as if I had known it all my life, and yet, I wasn’t sure where that life had gone. For days I held it to my chest like a toddler with a new plush toy, looking for something—just the right thing— to steal away inside it. My little runaway box. — The small beetle was making its way along the sill of my bedroom window when I found it, its back the pearly black that shimmers green and indigo in turns of light. My little brother, standing beside me, reached over and nudged it with his finger to see if it was alive, and the small body scuttled a few steps forward. I picked up a leaf and coerced the insect onto it so I could bring it closer and stare. I then held up the little box and gently laid both the insect and leaf inside. We named the beetle Whiskey, because we had met a dog named that once, and because the world in English tumbled in our mouths like something sweet and a little bit foreign. — We leave in early spring. By four in the morning we are awake, getting dressed quickly, tossing bags and blankets into the trunk. In the cool morning our breaths are fog, each of us floating in a little cloud of our own groggy exhalations. The whole garden is a cool blue at this time, draped over with a gentle notyet light, so that the green of the trees and grasses floats tantalizingly beneath the blue haze. The smell of rotting fruit is softer than in the afternoons, when it is buoyed by heat. I hold the little box with my small friend in it tightly to my chest. My uncle comes around the back of the car and hands me a rolled up quilt. Seeing what is in my hands, he reminds me to leave the lid cracked open for air. He tells me I can sleep in the car, plants a small kiss on the top of my head, and makes his way over to the driver’s seat. In his gait nothing gives way, in his steps not a single sign that he is giving up an entire life. The rest of us follow and we begin to
move. On the road I check the box periodically, and when we stop to stretch for the first time I pick some grasses for Whiskey to eat. When I peek inside it scuttles from one end of the box to the other, and I smile. __ For the next two and a half hours I drift in and out of sleep. My head rolls on my mother’s lap, my whole body swaddled in quilts. Between dreams I watch the different tones of the sky rolling by the window above my head. Sometimes tree branches brushing the glass; sometimes the nearness of the side of the mountain, dripping with rainwater and small white blossoms on vines; or on the other side, the expanse beyond the drop of the cliff, the undulating greenery looking soft enough to swim in. As we enter the agricultural region the air turns a little acrid: the smell of machinery processing palm seeds for oil. Everything is beautiful still, dense and rich and earthy. The next time I open the box the beetle is dead. — There is a small chapel by the side of the road, on the cliffside, close enough to look as if it might slide over the edge at any moment. We stop here, as we had done so many times before on trips to and from the hacienda—only this time we will go much further, and there is no way back. The chapel itself is white with a red-tiled roof, and its door anciently heavy, built of dark wood and inlaid with bits of iron, all of it damp with the rains of the last few hours. Inside all is candlelight. I hold my little box in one hand and my mother’s hand in the other. As I did in the antique shop, I sense the warping of time—gentle, but heavy. We take in each other’s warmth in the small space, cross ourselves, and light candles. We pray that we will make it the rest of the way without trouble: we know these lands of mudslides and wilderness are merciless. Before we turn to go, I leave the little box with the beetle inside it beside the altar. I wanted the soul of this valley to belong to me in a way that it never did.
Part 2 All We Made
Market The scent of it familiar for blocks; fresh and rotting fruit, twenty kinds of potatoes still carrying the earth on them.
and hungry, This is the center of life: hundreds of bodies sweating and another and the dogs waiting for scraps. One hand for change for this woven plastic bag, bulging as we do, bellies rounded for a moment rich with newborn fruit. A certain red—a beet, this textile, hands raw with labor—my feeding is the work of centuries.
In that corner: vegetable foliage, birds of paradise, little Amazon bared for our taking. Still damp with its rains, still home to the grasshopper, the mantis that came so far upriver in its folds. The smallest of bodies that knew this land before it ever thought of us; before this basin knew a mouth to sip from it; before the cacao seed was plucked; before, even, it had a name—and so long before it began to burn. Beneath these tents where we have sheltered from rain with the dogs and the flies: if only we had stayed like this, weaving between stacks of rice, gathering shellfish, spitting out seeds.
After the Explosion In those days it often looked as if it had been snowing— the burnt-tip orchid, chalk plateau and everything else that found us after the explosion. Everything the gentle pallor of ash; every body a white weeping cherry tree laden with blooms. In those days we knew the plain in its entirety; and even after, we stayed if only for a little while longer. remember: a child’s small hands on the veranda; the fine, warm powder the color of dust. below me, in the backyard twilight the garden tent torn open with heat. It might have looked like war: a man or a volcano, a series of bombs or a single burst. The same heat, the toppling, the far-off sirens wailing; held breath waiting for the aftershock. Had it been different
in time we might have understood erosion, or how our bodies could rise out of the sea; could have been the myth of reinvention, the burning
top of a volcano giving birth to another; or rather the possibility that everything was temporary. Instead these days we have grown used to stillness elsewhere; the softer, colder snows. A woman like we once might have seen on television could ask us what we have left behind. We would tell her eagerly as if we might return to draw a map: we would begin in the spring, the blooms not yet fallen; the landscape still intact.
Convocación y Renacimiento
Statue of the Virgen del Panecillo, Quito, Ecuador She who strangles the snake reminds you of how it began: the volcano gives way to a valley gives way to a hill—and on it her body like a beacon. Virgen; madonna; woman of the apocalypse what we have taken to mean salvation, and the whole world and our city tucked neatly below. In my dreams I am there: a graffitied highway, a gas mask for ashes, residue of an ancient birth story I am hardly familiar with. For years I saw the snow: I did not know it would be years before I understood. Not God, but mountain. This earth cathedral; the wooded nave, the buttressless vault. Cradle of everything we know, and have known, and will ever— only until it swallows us whole. The true colonial church is the facade; is my body not that body trampled in the streets. But one seated, praying, deep in its belly, a navel coated in gold. Inside the woman chains the snake and this time it surrenders. Outside a woman in wool shakes a paper cup with two small coins in it. Wingless, a lifted palm, empty. It is like this for centuries: each time her march is holy, unguilded. And each time after days of clashes a palm is offered empty, shaking—but my pockets bear no fruit. In the shadow of the valley all of us only another in a series of centuries. Above us, on the hill, the dancer:
lifted palm, wings of aluminum; a body verging on movement for decades—
the only one in the world with wings like an angel. And so on, and so on—this story is ritual.
Six Words For Departure He uses this word: grit body distance often. He is washed in green light. The taxi is for making advances—the curb for the inevitable split. If one hand opens like tulips, the body
a garden.
He swims in it. / Earlier, on a rooftop, you begin to understand you are nothing but the destined
encounter. He speaks your language—
as if to fit into
the space it has cut out
for both of you, or out of both of you
belonging nothing but a shared sense
of alienation; he croons
as if deshacer means an undoing
of harm and not clothing.
If not for his air of insistence you might have overlooked the sound of it. / If this spiral,
like the evening,
had come to a different conclusion
the light might have been unbearable. Or rather, the body laid bare
might have simply
dissolved. In a split second the hand on the thigh pulled back by vertigo. In a split second the car door closes. You are alone; the driveway is washed in green light. He speaks of: tongues pressure collapse— often, not at all.
My Teacher Makes / Reinvents the Universe You left as if you foresaw it: this end, the heaviness you could have no longer borne after all these years in the city. We were once all of us strangers to it. Like you, over time, we found our own ways and words for the losses, and if I could draw a trajectory to my own reinvention it might have all begun in this room: your pen clicking on the table as if with it you might have found a better explanation for what you would not name. You sought in it only what came after; I wanted only a word for the bruising beneath your eyes, if only a phrase for the ache, as if we might have explained it into vanishing. If I had known what it meant—to be seated where light filtered in so purely; to be at a loss for words when yours were so abundant—I might have known it was only a matter of patience. You spoke with stillness only to stir up everything relentlessly. Then by summer you were gone. Even now I hear your voice; read poetry in it; picture the room and everything in the soft window light; all of us as if made of glass. You, who knew what it meant each time we laid ourselves open for scrutiny; the silence after; the met gaze across the wide, white table. Hours of our own making and unmaking. To know if I am but a speck at least then it was within this galaxy of our own. Everything we did to feel significant, later let ourselves dissolve— or rather, to find that we had wanted both things. I will imagine you like this: some evening in the fall: low light oozing over glass: a poem mouthed softly in the driver’s seat of your car, and you: nodding your head, as if to music.
Even Then, a Downpour In the beginning we pulled leaves from eucalyptus trees. I knew my way back by the sound of your voice beneath the rose bushes beneath the rain warmed by tea-water, our bodies bruised on low hanging branches the avocados bruised on the warm, wet ground. Even now the rain reminds us of a beginning; I begin to find my way back by other sounds. In years since we found a yearning elsewhere —for other gardens and how we learned to love a dryer landscape. In the grassland, each spring the chicks in an old bronze bathtub, each summer the inescapable gaggle. The first time: hairlike, dandelion feathers between my fingers; weightless. It was a movement north, the sound of your voice sheltered in these plains and everything that changed at the center of our childhood—the evenings spent on fenced-in lawns or wading in the reservoir; making something softer of these years before you left—another immeasurable distance from where it all began. A constant reminder returns each spring: a downpour or leaves of eucalyptus returning like the myth of a life back then. As the frost prepares to settle I know a name for it: I know a word for grief. I do not know a word for how bodies separate. It was a hard year for the way we thought about love; but you said you dreamed about me, even then.
Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair Twombly makes your body a stranger: you become her: the rose that unravels the wound of loneliness that remains unspeakable and what I imagine heartache must look like on a tightly-pulled canvas. a number of strangers enter under a condition of stillness. of silence. no one speaks but wanders, looking. you and I for the love of it: we walk like mystics in a trance, spin like dervishes in silence— every sound will stop if you let it. really I admit my knowledge of your body is only this: the sense of a figure in a midtown gallery, skylight fragments pooling softly on the side of your face. and each time it is like this: the rose bleeds out light, as we conjure it, begins to settle— every aspect of this body gives in to it.
I Call it Waking I call it waking as if it is new. Each time morning light is in pieces: each time an open window like spring again: this time like nothing might change. I am slow before noon. I know the hum of these cicadas as if nothing ever was before. I am swallowed; I become comfortable. I love the wind-hum sound of the almost-but-not tropical storm / how you call it a home as if something about it might last. This house, this window facing the highway facing the cul-de-sac, and all of it sung (the white-winged dove the northern mockingbird the fragile carolina wren) into being. I miss this preemptively. Under the pressure of rain I and everything will soften as if to break would be the easier thing (and only then, fold over the window’s edge and only then, dream). I’m but an outline on the other side of the glass, and after four years of waking to the sounds of living trees, their bodies heavy with the birds and cicadas, I am heavy and I do not know how to leave.
Santo Domingo de los Colorados / Tsáchila It begins with a history that evades us—this movement this indescribable tenderness for the hold of the valley that raised us. Each winding on the cliffside road we knew so well, each landmark of the equatorial backbone was another in a series of visions that made and unmade us. In dreams I am the washed out roads, the blue-throated hummingbird against the raven, the Devil’s features carved into the rock face familiar like my own unmooring. It opens with fog, a chapel at the mouth of a cliff, and in it the rows of candles, and Mary in her body of wood, weeping because the earth has a tendency to split. Only each time afterwards, after the rain, in the chasms the soft earth breaks with new green. Like this all the land undulates; our heads bumping gently on pillows in the backseats of cars. We sleep and wake, forgetting which is real. We name rivers like shamans in a language that isn’t ours but familiar. My hair, your hair, we are of the same body. And we have the same dream, where small, white flowers line the walls and precipices: always, the sharp scent of burning palm oil and the factory hum that squeezes it from its bearing fruit; the snakes I see awake and in my dreams, shedding, cut open for ransom. This: my holy land: when I wake all of it is on fire— save the blue, chlorinated pool besides the muddy river and the sound of frogs, endlessly, in all our waking.
the end.
Special thanks to Ian Schimmel, the 2019-2020 Creative Writing Thesis Cohort, and the Rice University English and Visual and Dramatic Arts Departments.