Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez

4 poems

from Edge Beast

 

Transistor

The ferris wheel races its linchpin 

in the distance. Dirty lotuses 

spread, half-glowing with the red flare 

the town gives off to the night sky 

blushing on the marshes. Palm trees stiff 

sheathes, shadow-shot. I’m relishing 

alone like a song, nighttime my old 

sanctuary, having escaped the hotel 

full of sleeping.   

     Figures separate 

 

from tree shadows. A rope glides 

over my leg and when the last of it

goes, my head holds a rhythm 

of icepicks on ice: two women 

led like mares into the hotel. 

All around, a kind of mouth, silent 

and moist, clamps down. Urine 

smell, sound of dragging. My mouth 

dries out. A lightbulb ons a room.

I slink against the wall, look inside

this night’s only bright.

Cricket sounds magnify and recede

like a beating. What I see past 

the curtain makes my lungs

compress. The women are being led 

into the room to a naked man

leaning against the corner  

holding a  

  glass coke bottle 

casually. Wind lifts my hair. 

The world goes. Still. Now the sound 

in my ribcage finds the sounds 

in the room. Merges. 

With them. I can’t look, can’t can’t. 

Fear over my spine, a delicate

sensation, almost pleasant, dandelions 

twitching. 

 

A sound is crunching 

the gravel. Teeth. I can feel something specific

behind me, a heat. I turn. 

A herd of water buffalo

outblacking the night, their hooves

crunch down a slope and into

a pond where they become

weightless. 

 

Muddy lotus leaves 

laid thickly over water

I part them with knees hands 

trying to get inside

avoid the drop

any sound and the thick growth

muffles my entry.

I’m in it now.

 

I know something outside is throbbing.

 

Down there the marsh grass

down there where the water goes dead

like blind beetles

clinging to the bellies of livestock.

 

Mud meeting my waist

like an old friend,

bullies me under.

 

I’m trying to escape what

is happening in my head,

the terrible empathy.

What is happening to those women

is not happening to me

and is?

 

The moon shot through

with lice, that dark thank god 

and no stars

just the thick growth 

of matted hair over the water

I blend my hair into. 

 

Horns of steel glint 

over the black lake which is so quiet 

like the arm of an oil spill.

 

Hides are the warm tarps

that wrap the bones to the bones.

 

Zanesville Zoo

On the night of October 18, 2011, in Zanesville Ohio, Terry Thompson let loose scores of wild animals which he had been keeping in cages on his farm, then shot himself. Thompson had recently returned from a year in prison on federal weapons charges. When the police were alerted that the animals were running wild, County Sheriff Matt Lutz ordered his officers to shoot the animals. 49 animals were slaughtered. The 6 animals that survived were taken to the Columbus Zoo.

 

i. bovine

He came across the yellow 

bending weeds, swatting, as if 

the air bothered him. 

Above, ascending bees 

with bits of pollen,

sunlight a knife over Ohio. He dipped his hat, 

he rarely said more

than necessary. He carried a thick rope 

tied around his shoulder blade.

I heard his wife had gone left him—

my pity hands made him a sandwich

which he ate, several yards away 

from me, his eyes 

on the cows. I showed him the dead one

and the circle of trampled grass 

where she'd thrashed. He clicked

his teeth with his tongue as he tied 

hooves together, supporting one by one

each bovine leg on his shoulder. 

His music was the only sound

and the crunching of grass

from a nearby animal. Said he'd sauté

the 12-inch tongue in onions, 

throw everything else

to the lions. His arms and neck: the claw marks 

all over him—I pretended not to notice.

His pants black 

with old blood, I would have given 

a firm washing.

 

ii. eclipse

Moved to think about the edges of mountains again,

he turns his face where Mars would be

 

were there no cell to conceal it. 

He misses the lion's black mane, that almost-

 

impossible-to-touch. White scars 

felt in the dark, dry rivers he thirsts 

 

over again and again.

His stomach writhes with love 

 

despite how dangerous 

to touch them. He wakes a gasping.

 

Oh how he misses all the pretty little horses,

shying when the wind brought them 

 

tigers' scent. And when the other inmates

sleep, he touches his ink-etched skin,

 

remembers his wife’s weathered 

hands there, her body eclipsing

 

his. Where was she now—?

Wife in the loose surf, not helpless, but rather, 

 

making a sound that was her sound and impossible 

to break into. He had once woken to find her

 

untangling her hair with her fingers, sleepless, wild-eyed.

Had he wrenched her from the ocean's pit?

 

That little dry sound at the back of her throat...

A sound, turning in on itself

 

the way a seagull lifts its wings ever so

to shed what moisture clings.

 

iii. the bite

When the sheriff saw my shock 

and the black bear’s body—a curled fist—, 

he said, I gave the order. It’s on me, 

as if guilt could be transferred.

He sleeps in one piece, his life lines not stained. 

Pretend, as close as I come to mourn... 

pleas too late and no one but me and my metal arm. 

The bear’s small, almost imperceptible eyes frozen 

 

open. If limestone had ears, if chalk could speak. 

White calcite, I’m in a terrific gap, held in stalactite 

against a painstaking gush of remorse. My life thrown 

into a gallop, a rat’s race. To be a star in frenzy, 

revolving in the precise order of a free-for-all. 

My mind is still swarming over that grass. 

 

Oh stars, little dogs in the sky, your throng 

would floor the song in me, tong, tong,

a metal deadweight sound with 

consequences. When I forget, my curse 

will level me. My eyes, flashing 

backward, will not close again. 

When I killed them, I did it on my knees.

Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez, a poet and novelist from Vilches, Chile, is the author of La Pava (Ediciones Inubicalistas). They hold an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University and their poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in West Branch, DIAGRAM, Quarterly West, diode, and other literary journals. They live in Worcester, Massachusetts, and teach creative writing at Clark University. Learn more about their work on their website: mandygutmanngonzalez.com.