Six Poems by Krysta Lee Quejada Frost

SIX POEMS

by Krysta Lee Quejada Frost

The Dinner Table

After a while I forget how to speak with my hands. Years since. I eat with spoon and fork at the table, sometimes on the floor. Go through glasses of water just to feel full again. I stain the table with dark rims of dew.

Lolo serves us milkfish— the only meal he remembers how to make he could cook with his eyes closed. He has lost his grip, his muscles turned pulpy, eyes like seawater during typhoon season. Still, he eats with his hands. His fingers move as if strumming an instrument. A quiet sound.

I avoid the fish for the ampalaya, taste its bitterness on the back of my tongue. Without words lolo pushes the plate of fish towards me. I reach for it, trying to relearn what I have lost.

My hands are rash, thoughtless. My own skin taut over the bone as I separate the fish from its spine. Miming a language I once knew, awkward in my movements, lacking the precision of loss.

A splinter of bone gets caught in my throat— a word I cannot say. I gather a small ball of rice between my fingers

to swallow like I was once taught to do.

Mothers’ Daughters

we break chilled mangosteens against the tabletop and speak like we are our mothers’ daughters again. our fingers stained by the fruit’s red flesh— one white hand, one brown but our hearts are made of the same tin roof and sunlight, the same river our mothers crossed to get to school every morning.

her mother was beautiful but stronger than mine. sharp-tongued with cool skin. my mother was soft-limbed and lovely fitting against the roof of their mouths. in their rum-colored voices they hum that she is pretty, painting her body with the shadows of their hands.

as daughters we talk about what our mothers still carry, about how they’ve grown. my mother, that same beauty. that same shame for a body that has already forgotten itself, grown tough from the cold of another country’s blue mornings.

she says i should be ashamed to see my body bent for love. because she was once bent back and broken. because she never knew just how two people could bow.

and what she still calls love is shaped like a man’s teeth on her skin. on mine.

Modern Romance

I. They were in love. Kissing in cars, limbs strained against leather and glass. Their hands had no time for directions. No time for maps. It was drive or I’m getting out of the car. It was drive until the sky remembers morning. It was turn here and ease off the breaks, would you? I need a coffee but the roads are empty for miles.

II. They even texted without capitalizing the I’s. He saw her with her hair down, watching as she pulled the band away from her head, the hair falling slowly into place around her shoulders, a curtain calling in the night.

III. She said she fell in love with the city. He said she was a body of work. In their dreams they mapped out the memory of the other’s fingers brushing the secrecy of a wrist.

She takes up smoking. Then twenty-four hour convenience stores. Then libraries. Atlases and encyclopedias, old newspapers soft beneath her fingertips. Never novels or autobiographies. They hit too close to home. Tell me a story in which the body defends itself. Tell me a story with no words. The suggestion of bones beneath a smooth expanse of skin. There had been bruises, yes, and pangs and flares, and so much to be told until morning. You are a body of work.

IV. In her one-bedroom apartment she lets the curtains fall over the small window. The bed creaks beneath her weight as she crawls towards her new lover. She thinks, Love me like each star is a bullet wound, like where I’ve been broken is sealed with light.

Love me like we’re under the worst sky you’ve seen in your life and I am no longer an apology.

Love me like I had a chance to say goodbye.

But she stays quiet, twists her thick hair into a bun, lowers a quivering lip to the swell of flesh enveloped in shadow, and moves like she has nowhere else to go.

V. At dawn he wakes up to the sound of birds. He draws a hand to his chest and breathes. Tries to calm his beating heart, resounding from the absence of her skull against his shoulder.

VI. Tomorrow she will wake up and hope her lover did not notice the sound of the sea when she raised her mouth to the curve of her lover’s ear and breathed.

The night has yet to lift its heavy skirts. I wonder what he’s done about the birds.

Growing Pains

My mother said that once somebody sets you on fire you’ll always have a throatful of matches.

She meant that the body remembers. Skin the first language we cannot forget.

But what she called a lesson I called a scar. What she called a memory was another splinter to swallow.

That was when I thought of myself as a husk. When I wanted to break the body. Before language broke me and laid me bare on the page.

She called them growing pains— the bones trying to escape the flesh, the heart knocking against the ribcage, the poem too heavy for the hand.

And when the sky is wound tight around a seed of light like this—

resisting the pull of morning just to crack full of light like this,

I’ve learned it can go either way:

rebelling and breaking or softening and ripening in the waiting yawn of day.

Last Summer

It did not come as a shock, the news of my father swimming in the midst of a violent storm, ready to surrender his limbs to the ocean, thinking this is it, this is it,

but the storm held its breath and he carved the current to the lip of the water

and that was it.

It was not many years ago. In fact it was just last week his back locked itself into a curve as he brushed his teeth, his head nearly slamming into the faucet,

and again his body gave way to thought as he crawled to the bedroom to write, and he wrote it all, even a note the nature of which I cannot say out loud, not now

not ever

not when he refused to look at me in the hospital, ashamed that life could be fed to him from a tube, wearing his sunglasses as he always did, like he had given up on looking people in the eye, or letting them know

that he still did after all this time

he waits, and I call with nothing to say but I’m out of bread, because what else, what else could I have said, that I was afraid, that from miles away mom told me what you hid, that you were the one who taught me about the cosmic joke, it changed my life, dad, how could you

forget?

And yet

the next morning a loaf of bread always awaited me.

For weeks I stopped by his office until he no longer closed his eyes when we talked. I spoke of nothing but my poetry, where I wanted to lead it and where I wanted it to lead me, which he knew was not a plea for life

but a thank you,

until finally he said yes, I’d like to go there too.

Healing Hands

my lover is an artist stuffed into the shell of a boy. imprints of his father’s fists and warm skin covered with scraps of metal. he kisses with his eyes closed, his hands completely open.

summer is infinite and we are hungry and tired of repenting. the tongue tastes regret on the skin. we are all pillars of salt for looking back.

slowly we take off our clothes. i remove his spare parts and he unravels me. underneath it all we are both so thin.

we are like water cupped in the other’s trembling hands. terrified of spilling. remembering what it felt like to be let go.

COMMENTARY

For this group of poems, I was prompted by the tendency of confessional poets to use language as a tool to access and evoke the very personal and often difficult topics such as trauma, loss, desperation, and death. Unlike poets like Sexton and Plath, however, I do not breach the specifics of mental illness, but, through my use of imagery in the poems, try to capture the sense of despair and fear that often accompany it. Although I approached the subjects of my poems similar to the confessional poets, the style I employ is mainly inspired by contemporary poets of color such as Audre Lorde and Amiri Baraka.

I wanted my use of “silence” in the poems to communicate just as much as the words I chose; thus, I focused on centering my poems around tangible images rather than obscure abstractions, hoping that the clarity of images could work in harmony with the nuances and quietness of the poem. Rather than a forceful, momentous rhythm, I opted for more subtle, restrained movements in the language that, in their simplicity, may communicate the intensity of the emotion that lay beneath the words as an undercurrent. Audre Lorde’s poetry—specifically the power of her imagery despite the light and fluid movement of her language—was my foremost influence when it came to style.

“The Dinner Table” is one such poem that makes use of minimal and simple language, relying on the interplay of “silence” and words to convey a sense of longing for an aspect of culture that the speaker has lost—that is, eating with one’s hands, which the speaker considers as significant a practice as speaking a language. For me, the scene of the dinner table evokes a strong sense of cultural identity and the intimacies of family. This poem’s style is more akin to Lorde’s work than a confessional poet, given the poem’s focus on images of family and culture. “Mothers’ Daughters” has a similar theme, this time focusing on a mixed race Asian American mother/daughter dynamic, the tensions regarding gender, and the discrepancies in the way a shared culture is lived out throughout generations. Though the tone is more nostalgic and the language more lyrical, it nevertheless relies on its images to tell its story. It also hints at the ways that patterns sexism and abuse are excused, normalized, and perpetuated among women in one’s own family. Though the voice in these poems is undeniably personal, it also calls attention to the more political themes of race, ethnicity, and gender.

“Modern Romance” is one of the more stylistically experimental poems in the collection; it also lacks the tangibility and clarity of the other poems. It begins with an angry, aggressive voice—inspired by Richard Siken’s poetry in Crush—before easing its way into a tone of loss and longing. Though the voice is more narrative than personal, its sense urgency and broken, staggered stanzas and images suggests a kind of clawing desperation for survival. I was influenced by the confessional poets’ themes of mental illness and emotional brokenness to portray a destructive relationship between two people who nevertheless remain attached to each other as a source of exhilaration—as damaging as it may be.

Comparatively, “Growing Pains” exhibits an emergence from such destruction by growing with, instead of resisting, the pain and scars of trauma. Although this poem also features mother and daughter figures, their relationship is notably more supportive and empowering than that of the previous poem. Like Lorde’s language in the poem “Coal,” I make use of fire and light metaphors as well as imagery relating to growth, and being born from nature. Like Lorde, who discusses the nuances of different words in her poem, I also refer to the significance of yielding to language as a way of healing and dealing with pain.

“Last Summer,” on the other hand, forgoes the simplicity and emphasis on imagery for a very personal—and indeed confessional—voice. Unlike my other poems, the style is quite different in that I do not restrain the flow of emotion or clip my language, instead allowing it to propel the poem. The use of “silence” was not a factor in this poem. I wanted the words to gain momentum as the poem developed, as if it were just rolling off the speaker’s tongue. This is the only poem that alludes to a suicide attempt and an immediate, gripping fear of death. It is also the poem that “says” more than it “shows”—a consequence of the personal voice and the way the speaker almost steps out of the poem to address her father and how he has affected her. It is a poem defined by what it says rather than how it is worded.

For my last poem, “Healing Hands,” I return to a simple and quiet language but retain a similarly personal voice—one of pain and constraint as the speaker struggles to escape the cyclical nature of trauma. I was inspired by Baraka’s “An Agony. As Now”—specifically, the way the speaker of the poem considers himself being “inside someone” and the detached way that he senses the world, as if separated from his own skin. The characters in my poem come together by lifting their protective barriers, opening each other

up to vulnerability as well as a process of healing—a notion similar to Baraka’s strong allusions to metal and imprisonment as, paradoxically, ways that damage and preserve the inner self. Baraka’s poem is about the anguish of internalizing anti-blackness and self-hatred, and is therefore also political in its scope. Although my poem lacks a political angle, it nevertheless tries to illustrate the ways in which people come to terms with the damage caused by abuse—as well as the fear of that realization itself.

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EXISTENTIALISM IN WRITING