Looking at Women
by Iliana Rocha
My father taught me how. His curious eyes, perpetually amber from drinking, would scan a woman, rest on a bold curve they liked: tits or ass. He was not a leg man. It would begin innocently enough, his arm draped across a bench at the mall, my mother shopping. I’d sit in his armpit, matted hair in Old Spice while his gaze trucked each body teetering on stilettos. Weekends, my father watched Sábado Gigante, would hoot & holler at the women wearing nothing but dark eyebrows & overdrawn lips, occasionally an accordion as a dress. ¡Damn! he would exclaim. Damn. There were also the pornos, soft-core, half-naked women with their hard breasts mistakenly attached to ribs. “Hot blonde” was a universal phrase, & brunettes became sexy only when they removed their glasses & shook their tight buns loose from their heads. Teachers can be hot too. Sometimes I slept on the living room sofa, & the TV’s glare would wake me: nude mermaids fingering each other in the gills, merman sucking their shiny pennies of nipple. Then there was the internet history. More women—some pregnant, some just chubby. I noticed my own body, legs half-tree trunk, half-lightning rod. Tried to pinch the skin around my knees & ankles into neater shapes. A waist strangled into a waist: el número ocho, la guitarra. Some have found that waist, others reached right through it to other women everywhere: one positioned obediently in the emptiness of one boyfriend’s computer screen, sunny & grinning in bikini. Continuous others popped up, contained in rectangles, snapping a thong’s hot pink. I started to look, too, at one in a commercial licking barbecue sauce from her fingers. My stare isn’t all that different than his—start from the face, scroll down. I love a woman in a tight dress, done up like a drag queen.
Iliana Rocha earned her PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University. Her work has been featured in the Best New Poets 2014 anthology, as well as The Nation, RHINO, Blackbird, and West Branch. Karankawa, her debut collection, won the 2014 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is available through the University of Pittsburgh Press. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Central Oklahoma and lives with her three chihuahuas Nilla, Beans, and Migo. "Looking at Women" first appeared in Karankawa.
"Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live: Poetry & the Body" is the second annual offering of the Poetry Coalition -- more than twenty organizations nationwide dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and communities, as well as the important contributions poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. A founder member of the Coalition, Letras Latinas at Notre Dame's Institute's for Latino Studies has partnered with the Best American Poetry blog to present 10 poems by women in March that engage with this year's theme, which borrows a line from U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith's "Flores Woman." The poems in this project were curated by Emma Trelles.
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