Charlotte Pence
(A+B+C)
All month in Ecuador I’d been waiting for it.
So, when I found myself on all fours circled by
eight policeman, guns pointing at my spine,
left kidney, shoulder, it was something of a relief.
I’m not saying Ecuador’s that third-world
gang-rape-a-girl place. I’d been there
six times before, never felt nervous,
but I’d noticed a change this last visit.
Longer stares not at my ass or tits or hair,
but at my jacket pockets, my hands. We’d become
drug runners. “We,” I’d learn later, blonde
Americans in their twenties, in search of life
experiences. So, I was separated from my husband,
taken across the tarmac to an empty airport hanger.
But nothing’s ever empty: jumbled engine parts,
some mattress pads, dried palm leaf.
Los perros huelen las drogas, one said, and pointed
to my suitcase on the concrete floor
where I was ordered to get down, unpack it.
So there I was on all fours, circled by them,
thinking how my body is just a body.
I began yanking everything out, shaking the panties
and polka-dot bra. Two guys turned away. I started
yelling, Do you know who I am?, although the answer
is nobody. Nobody in the same way no place
is ever empty. And then I found it,
a three-pound bag of animal crackers in shapes
of the blue-footed booby, lava lizards,
Galapagos sea turtle and cormorant.
I could have had a dick in mouth, pussy, ass
because of cookies drug dogs craved.
The flightless cormorant knows how one event
leads to the next—like how a MasterCard expiring
on the trip led to less money to buy 8 nephews
a gift, which led to the 3 pound bag of cookies,
too bulky for my carry-on—how all that can end up
resulting in something. Just basic math:
a country’s lack of money equaling young men
with guns, drug-running girls, and tourists
in need of “exotic” gifts. And I knew
it was nothing to rage against, but I had to keep
yelling to hold them back, any silence an opening.
I thought of how a+b+c leads to birds too fat to fly
and girls on all fours waiting for one man
to decide restraint has no benefit and take that first
step closer. One man plus one step would equal
a second man and wrenching back
of one arm. Simple arithmetic the thing between us.
–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
March 7th, 2010 at 9:10 am
For me, there are two striking things about this poem:
1. The speaker is a white person who is treated unfairly (profiled and searched, in this case) based upon her race. So much poetry addresses this issue from the black perspective. I think it is fascinating looking at it from the white perspective. I’m actually thinking this may become a trend (or counter-trend) in poetry.
2. One wonders how much of the speaker’s fears are real and how much is imagined. She wasn’t raped. Was she really in any danger of being raped? The math adds up to “something”; but what is it?
The two are possibly related. For example, a person (of any race) may “think” they are being treated differently b/c of their race, but race may be completely irrelevant.
Anyway, a really great poem. Thanks to the poet for writing it, and thank you to Rattle for publishing it.
May 23rd, 2011 at 12:26 pm
It is an interesting piece of writing. It is utterly not poetic though. It is straight narrative prose with no figurative language, no poetic function. It reads like a banal memoir or a travel blog broken into stanzas.
Ii say it is prose not from a shallow perspective in that I think poems should rhyme or have form. I’m not that dumb. I say it from a perspective of, according to Jakobson, de Man, or any literary theorist of note really, that this does not embody a poetics so much as a slice-of-life. It is an anecdote if anything.
May 23rd, 2011 at 9:59 pm
I think you do yourself a disservice by being so narrow and prescriptive in your definition of what poetry is or can do. Enjoy it or not, but enforcing your own belittling label is just arrogance, no matter how many names you drop. Some of us can enjoy an interesting anecdote set to the natural music of speech.