Benjamin Garcia: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Le Daría Mis Pulmones

 

Toward the end, she could only

lift a cup of coffee. Closer still,

even that became too much for her,

my mother. A sponge, then,

I’d dip in coffee, or dip pan dulce,

and put that to her lips to suck. That

was all the cancer let her manage.

 

The IV was her sugar water, and she

the hummingbirds she loved to watch,

busy at the red and yellow feeder.

Those plastic flowers welded on

were poor excuses, but they worked. Whatever

 

worked, I guess, my mother thought,

lived. On the bed in the living room,

her body of sleeping birds, her dream

of a thousand green wings shimmering like

shreds of aluminum, that could, at any moment,

unloose on the wind. Toward

 

the end, the sponge and the coffee, the cancer.

She couldn’t smoke anymore either, of course,

because even drawing her own drag: impossible.

So she had me smoke for her—nine years old—

I was her lungs. I blew the smoke right in her face, right

in her face. Just like that, over and over:

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Benjamin Garcia’s first collection, Thrown in the Throat, won the National Poetry Series and the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, in addition to being a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He works as a sexual health and harm reduction educator in New York’s Finger Lakes region, where he received the Jill Gonzalez Health Educator Award recognizing contributions to HIV treatment and prevention. A CantoMundo and Lambda Literary fellow, he serves as core faculty at Alma College’s low-residency MFA program. His poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in: AGNI, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. His video poem “Ode to the Peacock” is available for viewing at the Broad Museum’s website as part of El Poder de la Poesia: Latinx Voices in Response to HIV/AIDS.

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      Frida Kahlo, Henry Ford Hospital (la camo volando), 1932. Collection of Dolores Olmedo Mexico City, Mexico.

Comments

[Doug Pell]

Kind of disturbing it perfectly paired with Frida Kahlo.

[Indran Amirthanayagam]

Care giving is the most difficult art. You do it well. You do it so it hurts, so it opens up the heart and mind. Thank you. Indran

[Abbie Mulvihill]

What a beautiful poem. I love all the hummingbird imagery.

[Geoffrey Himes]

Transformation, not simile. She didn't resemble the hummingbird; she became the hummingbird. He didn't resemble her lungs; he became her lungs.

[Don Berger]

Really beautiful how well those hummingbirds do work and stunning how the speaker at nine years old appears blowing smoke in his mother's face--both these things unexpectedly propel Garcis's narrative. Great pick Terence, of a poem that grabs the reader suddenly and urgently.

[Wanda R Phipps]

Beautiful Poem--thank you!

[lally]

quietly perfect poem, thank you benjamin garcia and terence and frida

[Bill Nevins]

Stunning ending and a beautiful poem throughout. Reading and re reading and enjoying. Thank you!

[Clarinda]

What Geoffrey Hines said. Yes.
I love it all. I should have smoked my fathers pipe for him but I guess he would not have approved— he had stopped smoking it when a lifelong friend died of cancer of the tongue after 65 years of pipe smoking. How awakening this poem is.

[Terence Winch]

Don: Glad you liked it

[Terence Winch]

Thanks for the comment, Michael

[Eileen]

Beautiful tender poem.

[Dr. Earle Hitchner]

Indulging an indulgence to assuage the dying it caused is both contradiction and compensation. The caregiver leavens discomfort through the agent of that discomfort: cigarette smoke. It’s both reminder and mercy. Or is it? Could it also be a final act of a nine-year-old child’s defiance, puffed by anger at a mother’s self-destructive habit? Maybe it’s a commingling of all those reasons. Death is the absence of more chances. The mother, the child, and we, the readers, are acutely aware of that. “Whatever / worked, I guess, my mother thought, / lived.” The fake flowers for the hummingbirds and very real smoke for the mother, in the end, worked. So does Benjamin Garcia’s poem--wonderfully.

[Peter Kearney]

I think the sense of the title is: [If she asked me,] I would give her my lungs. This describes the utter devotion of the author as a boy. To become the hummingbirds gave the mother a sense of release. She could dream of flying away. But bound to the bed, she found comfort in the help of her young son. We may detect a questioning air on the part of the author as an adult, but for the boy there is only empathy and loving compliance.