according to susan sherman :
according to may sarton
: the day before my abuelita
was born
it was incredibly hot in france
according to may sarton :
according to bernadette
: the virgin came to her in a cave
and told her if she was de dios
step on up but if she was del diablo
step on out
bernadette was concerned about writing
about leaving pages behind
but the virgin was concerned
about what does not need to be written
about happiness not dependent
upon this world
one day the virgin instructed bernadette
to build a church
wash and eat grass by the fountain
as if what ailed her was in the stomach
when Bernadette dug into the earth
and a stream appeared the way visions
and virgins appear which is to say
out of nowhere
it became holy water de Lourdes
*
i have seen you
turning pages and people
kneeing their way
to santiago de compostela
hanging crutches on the wall en chimayó
before she died i placed a little green bottle
of holy dirt del santuario
next to my abuelita
i wanted her to believe
instead she asked:
should i have hope?
and tho the question has haunted me
it does not need to be
written down
*
the day abuelita was born
a glow from our closest moon
heat unrecorded
war unstarted
when i was still young
still unheartbroken
i traversed via dolorosa
in the old city of jerusalem
in all its discontinuity
abuelita assumed a pilgrimage
instead of just trying to make sense
of all the names in all the pages
to see how images change imagination
to see what would remain
when i was in the middle ages
looking back on painful stations
and stones beginning in the body
the day after she died
i asked abuelita
for a sign
we each asked
for a different sign
a different parable
to be assured we too
are supernaturally imprinted
como el pañuelo de verónica
*
letter writing was sacred for sarton
a sunday morning ritual
that morning when mamá and i
were in oak park playing a game
opening books at random
pointing to a passage to read aloud
she opened sarton’s 1916-54 letters
and pointed to a page that said
‘send me a poem from [ ]’
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 4.
Marcy Rae Henry is a multidisciplinary Xicana artist from the Borderlands who’s had motorcycle crashes in Mexican-America, Turkey, and Nepal. She is the author of the body is where it all begins (just out from Querencia Press), dream life of night owls (Open Country Press 2024), and We Are Primary Colors (DoubleCross Press 2023). Her poetry collection, death is a mariachi, won the May Sarton NH Prize for Poetry and will be published this spring. Her work has received a Chicago Community Arts Assistance Grant, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, a Pushcart nomination, first prize in Suburbia’s Novel Excerpt Contest, and Kaveh Akbar recently chose her fiction collection as a finalist for the George Garrett Fiction Prize. MRae is a professor of English, literature, and creative writing at Wright College Chicago, a Hispanic Serving Institution, where she serves as Coordinator of the Latin American Latino/x Studies Program and received Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society’s 2023-2024 Outstanding Educator Award.
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