ESSAYS AND POEMS

SUSAN
Marcos M. Villatoro

She kissed me in the dark room of a Tuesday
in the study hour, while the Seniors
of Knoxville Catholic High School wilted over books

and slid notes over tables and giggled
at Randy, always Randy. We were tired. Winter
was over. This was Tennessee, with air

slipping off the Smoky Mountains, filling the city
with dollops of spring. We all felt it.
Eighteen. Glory. Even with the shallow breaths

from parents with their feathered hair and hopes
regarding graduation and something called careers,
we felt the air clutch tight our hips and lift

us to our toes. Susan and I studied
a pep rally floating in a vat. What began
the movements? Whose fingers first snapped the law

that kept at bay the geeks and girls and dark rooms?
My fingers hooked her hips. Her arms
roped my nape. My knee wedged her legs. The kiss

came from the past. Had to, for it was
such a kiss. She taught me how to open,
how to close. She shed my glasses for me

and pierced me with a happiness so true
I've spent the years rousing her on paper
so as to stay alive. Let me stay there,

pivoting with her, a narrow pirouette
in a closet rank of chemicals,
before I turned banal. Before I remembered

something so important, what the good boys do:
"Thank you," I said. I actually thanked her.
That's when a dumb ass turns to some pictures

in a pan, turns to yearbook deadlines, folds into
the rules. Dumb ass! And oh how Susan saved me
from regret. Her chin now on my shoulder,

her arms wrapped round my hips. Both our faces over
the jumping cheerleader in the pan.
Through the years, as I have taken Truth

and fiddled with its pin, I've done all I could
to shuck that moment of its green flannel skirt
and untied tie retied. but nothing works.

I wonder why the image of her chin
upon my shoulder rouses me the more?
What she was saying then, as though her lips

so near my ear, meant to whisper something
about her dark room, and what made her kiss?

© Sombrerón Productions, Inc.

MRI
Marcos M. Villatoro

The machine sucked my daughter into itself. The grind and metallic screams were so loud that Emily couldn't hear a word I said, even though I sat right next to the MRI machine, screaming out passages from a book. To sooth her. Me, wearing ear muffles that airport workers use while guiding jets on the tarmac, yelling out a novel as if a novel could get us through all this.

The machine cradled Emily in a pod and crackled. It snarled. Electricity snapped at the air. She, like Frankenstein, lay there, not moving, as they had instructed her. "You can't move," said Enrico, the technician, "we have to take a picture of your mind."

Movement was our issue. Emily, who has Tourettes, uses her body to express excitement, joy, or today, panic. She hates the MRI. Yet every two years she must undergo it, due to a thin slab of foreign tissue in her brain. It hasn't hurt her, and so far it hasn't grown; but it's something the doctors strongly suggest to watch.

"I hate that thing," she said, just before the procedure. So we gave her drugs.

Enough Valium to keep her slurring. She stumbled to the hard titanium cocoon of a cot and flopped down. She got a series of hard slaps to her cheek before forcing herself immobile. Enrico stood back and turned to me. "Tourettes," I said. He nodded.

Forty minutes of a metallic grinding, the screams of a machine. Forty minutes of no movement from a young woman who moves so much. It ends. She stumbles out. We thank Enrico, leave, have fun with her sedation all the way home. All this to find out if a growth, thin and gelatinous and in the middle of her brain, born there with her, has changed in the last two years say it Has Grown. And I am afraid to confess it, the thing we all don't want to confess about our children: I fear losing her. My kids are all teenagers now. They are interesting people with ideas and desires. At night, it's actually enjoyable to hang out with them over dinner and talk. They're growing; yet under something as rude as the MRI, I realize, always, they are my children. Little ones, who I will always want to protect from the mad crackle of the world.

Poet and novelist Marcos McPeek Villatoro teaches writing at Mount St. Mary's College in Los Angeles. He's happy to report that the MRI results on Emily, were fine.

A TETHER OF WORDS
Marcos M. Villatoro

This latest episode hit during an eternal rain that soaked southern California. Houses sank into the muddy edge of Los Angeles. A child who stood too close to a new, raging river fell in and disappeared, followed by a father who hoped to save him and couldn't. It had been a dark three weeks for everyone. I knew no person who, after twenty days of thick downpours, celebrated them. No more, "We need this, after a seven year drought," or "I really like the rain. It's a change of pace from all that sunshine." No one said much of anything, except to beg, all this rain, when will it end? The desperation, like a wet fever, clung to us all.

Seven hours of sleep, parceled over three nights. My eyes searched for rest until four in the morning, when something kicked in, a rattle of a hull. Asleep at four, awake at seven. Each night, the outside light from a street lamp grew more harsh, as if it had changed position out on our avenue, had hunched closer to my bedroom window. The room glowed with, what? Moonlight? Or the lamp? How could there be moonlight, with all that rain? Where was that light coming from? And how did Michelle sleep through it all? How did the curve of my wife's back lift and fall with the easy breath of one who is gone? They were all gone, my wife, my four children. I imagined them in the same place, not gathered in any conversation, but together in some distant dream. And now I wandered in that place where ghosts dwell: among us, but alone.

All that rain. Rivers of water throughout the world, pouring through me into some hole that never filled.

Then the final night. That black morning, beyond anger, beyond the eruptions of rage. No more rage, which meant acquiescence. As my family drifted to sleep, and I was alone once again, I stared about the house and considered the advice from a therapist, about getting up and working, writing something, reading, then get back in bed once you get sleepy and do breathing exercises. I read but only saw the words, could not put together whatever images the pages offered. I graded a paper. I wrote a letter. Then I lay in bed and breathed, for an hour. Breathe in joy, breathe out stress, joy, stress. An hour. Nothing. I got up, walked about the house from one corner to another, for another hour. So much light permeated the building, the glow from the computer screen, the ubiquitous lamp outside, the night light in a child's bathroom. This was not pacing; this was an erratic leap from futon to rocking chair, staring out a window, waiting for something to happen, waiting for it to let me go. The shadows in the house, all shredded by the light. I considered wine, but didn't want it, as it had lost all taste in these days. I thought of bourbon and knew how it affected me, how like a mercurial poison it is in my stomach, in this bag of skin. Finally the thought of Xanax, the entire bottle, along with the bourbon and any other pill and capsule in the house, an image that then raced me to the kitchen, to the cutlery block and the butcher blade and all that brought desire and that roused up an old fear. The desire and the fear, they were my responses to what I can now only label as the voices, or the voice. That empty shell of syntax, which carries about a ghost of a thought, that is the voice. Why no one else can hear it but you.

I sat at the desk with the latest journal and a pen and filled the empty hull of syntax with words. "I want to die." Making the ghost whole, real. Then I sat up straight and considered the newborn sentence. Yes, that was it. A sentence.

Four children in each room, asleep, far away. A woman in my bed, in the purr of dreams.

Five fifteen in the morning. The cry rose out of me as if it were a thing apart, a moan, a lost sound from somewhere inside, a wandering yelp in a cave whose walls were wet from all that rain. It began while I stood in the library. I, the body, wailed. I the body carried the wail down the hall to the bedroom. I stood there, and let the low scream rattle out of me as if it were a tether thrown to her; that she would wake and catch it and pull me to her. The wail became tiny words, I haven't slept, oh god I'm so afraid Michelle please help I don't want to die but it's coming on again from long ago and right then the rains, all those days of rain, ended.

Dawn came. The sun, something we had not seen in weeks, barely peeked through the window.

But this was not hope. Metaphors had gathered around me for weeks: the gray clouds, the darkness of night, all were there to make me into rain, to flood me, to wash me away. Now, suddenly, dawn. Sunlight. It was not hope. It was a joke, how the rain ended, right then, after an entire night of no sleep, after greeting my wife with a shredded scream. It was a moment in which a little god is born, the one that drops from the clouds and laughs at you, that volleys you about with the demons on the ground.