BIO
Iliana Rocha is originally from Texas, and she earned her PhD in English-Creative Writing at Western Michigan University. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing-Poetry from Arizona State University, where she was Poetry Editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review. Her work was chosen for the Best New Poets 2014 anthology and has previously appeared in Bennington Review, Banango Street, Blackbird, andThird Coast. Her first book, Karankawa, won the 2014 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Website: ilianarocha.org
White Mexican Girl
The rivers ran like couplets until they fell off the earth,
& she named each loss for its stone: father, yesterday,
chasing them across the water, until the muddy afterbirth
ruined what little clean was left of her socks. Mexico’s mouth
open wide—like a row of blond dolls, stalks of maize sang,
& the rivers ran like couplets until they fell off the earth,
her mother’s geography at fault, dough covered in cloth
like a casket. A circle of vultures, like butts in an ashtray,
chase their reflection across the water, until the moon thirsts
itself dry like a widow. There, her first & last curse
strangling the trees, a rosary around her wrist, she obeyed
the rivers running like couplets, falling off the earth,
beer escaping a bottle’s safety, diminutive amber urn
comfortable with each slow death. My mother’s carefree slang
chastising snakes across the water, until it’s adulthood’s turn
to forget: I love you, meeeeeeha, my little core-a-zone, burning
like history in reverse.
Rita Hayworth Tryptych
"If this was happiness imagine what the rest of her life had been!" –Orson Welles
Rita
The heart is pushed through the
city streets like a
homeless man’s shopping cart, a wire husk. You
were admired
for your fragility, a scorpion
suspended in a paper weight, the stale asshole
of a
rose drying on a wall. There is a reason we keep
these things: every loss
is a phobia. A woman who
punished herself, as if her own body were a staircase
in feces. Her lovers in constant burp like her
refrigerator. A woman with a
collection of dolls
from her own twisted, pink jaw. Her middle finger at
attention, poking the ceiling.
White Mexican Girl
My whole life has been self-hatred, never marry a
Mexican, there have been countless Jasons, Jeremy,
Ryan, Shanes, Justins, so many more I can’t even
remember. Carrie, Kristen,
& I collected our white
boys as if they were stolen cigarettes I’d keep in
my
back pocket, a faded denim rectangle. A crime scene
outline of heritage. But
what have the boys ever
done except mispronounce my name, shake the dust
from
the dresses of history? Kiss like the Gulf of
Mexico, the Deepwater Horizon
Disaster? My upper
lip is rotten like a window shade in my
grandmother’s house,
threads loose everywhere,
close it now: The little girl who was warned into
this
world.
Rita
Men were disappointed when they went down on
her, &
she tasted of pencil shavings rather than
baking bread & suntan lotion. She
didn’t unravel as
easily as they expected, despite the delicate lingerie
that
wore her, sewn by French nuns. She murdered
the woman she was in order to become
herself: bad
mother, good. Electric shocks killed her follicles. She
bathed in
bleach. Like her sadness, we have all been
misdiagnosed, memory in remission: father, father,
father. Rita
Hayworth is not my mother. Rita
Hayworth is not my grandmother. Hey, don’t
lecture
us about our drinking—we needed it to straddle
Mexico like
a thimble.