BY MONIQUE QUINTANA
Marisol Baca's debut poetry collection, Tremor (Three Mile Harbor Press, 2018), is an earth echo of things lost and gained in southwestern girlhood and domestic tickings, the secrets of a Xicana heart. In keeping with the fall equinox rituals for the dead, here is a close reading of her poem, "Sarcophagi in Glass Houses [after an installation at The Storm King Art Center, and the death of my Great Aunt]."
In "Sarcophagi in Glass Houses," the speaker relays the motions of feeding the body at the same time and space as mourning departed souls from the body. She says, "Mom and Auntie Patsy hitching / the meat out / pulling the seeds and membrane / from the inner lining." This movement would seem a grotesque of mechanics to some families, but the action is ritual in the poem. There is tension in the contact between hands and surface, the intimacy found in shared and distant quiet between the living and the dead, "little fingers tugging at the green tongues / speechless in their hands / packing them into glass jars."
At this moment, there is a muffled sound and a slippery image, which we see cycled back when we find the notion of sarcophagi, moving family relics that are the pulse of the poem, "The chiles arrive in pods / The pods are much too tight / They break the sides open." Here is the cosmic moment, the lack of sound, and the family body politic's slow rupture. The speaker is becoming more and more attuned to death's arrival:
It was in New York,
much later
I walked in the hills
and stayed close to the water
away from the groves
I found these constructed graves
these insect wrappings
The sarcophagi follow the speaker through time and space. The fusion of textiles makes a disconcerting disposition that is pervasive throughout Baca's collection. There is the sublime in seeing something so beautiful it makes you think of death.
Monique Quintana is a Xicana from Fresno, CA, and the author of the novella Cenote City (Clash Books, 2019). Her short works have been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and the Pushcart Prize. She has also been awarded artist residencies to Yaddo, The Mineral School, and Sundress Academy of the Arts. She has also received fellowships to the Community of Writers, the Open Mouth Poetry Retreat, and she was the inaugural winner of Amplify’s Megaphone Fellowship for a Writer of Color. You can find her @quintanagothic and moniquequintana.com.