mónica teresa ortiz makes me look like Little Mary Sunshine. Like me, she was raised Catholic, but unlike me, she’s gay, Latinx, and working class. O — and she’s from Texas. So, she comes by it honestly. For instance, in her first poetry collection, muted blood (with its all-black cover broken only by a cow skull), we find a poem entitled “post hope,” where the speaker decries “tornadoes in Dallas. / In December!” It’s a short distance from there to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which
floods in permafrost. whether the weather is deconstructed. or not. we do not have more time. new varieties do not vapor into existence, out of nothing. The end. There is no injunction to “DO SOMETHING, PEOPLE — NOW!!” — though that may be a silent echo after the last line. But silent, nonetheless. Violence against Mama Gaia is only one type of violence, but is related, for ortiz, with violence against Queer people, violence against women, violence against people of color, violence against immigrants. Those connections become even clearer in her new collection, autobiography of a semiromantic anarchist (Host Publications 2019). The first part, “the waiting room,” consists of a series of vignettes from the poet’s life thus far — coming out to her conservative mother; coming out as a political radical; seeing 24/7 violence on cable, often committed against marginalized persons; and existing in a country where “men in red hats / replace men in white hoods.” Part 2, “sanctuary,” is a series of prose poems that weave together all these necropolitical threads. And ecocide is a big part of that: “I wonder how long it’ll be before them bald cypress trees will cough and die under the choke of a drought or sink underwater on ice caps fully melted and push the Gulf up past the tonsils of Galveston,” the speaker muses, and ends by declaring: humanity only cares about the core for its liquid gold we substitute oceans with plastic our civilization ends with fossils sealed inside the same ground where I now wait admiring the waterfall singing over bodies of limestone “Texas used to be a sea,” and here we can see it sinking back into one. “We of the Nintendo Generation,” as the speaker terms her cohort, try to survive and find one another, in the flesh or in the “digital abyss”: “We fuck under the conditions of economic collapse and climate change” — and colony collapse disorder, carcinogenic chemicals, hate crimes, tear-gassed children, the disappeared. All this can get you down: I wish for the planet to be habitable again, rid of assassins and intangible silences. I cannot touch either. Are we really surviving the Holocene or are we sitting anxiously in the waiting room of extinction, popping Xanax to expedite our forgetting? It’s a good question, and the link with the silences — both of the dead and of the estranged and alienated — is well taken. As for the poet’s native Texas, it “is a Death-World,” where “graves pile up higher than mesquite,” where people think they’re worshipping God when they’re really adoring Santa Muerte. The collection ends with a note of realism and longing: “I only want to exist / as earth and ash / my bones belong to me / even when I don’t belong / to the earth.” The people of the United States — “Americans” — are necrophobes living under a necrocracy; and autobiography of a semiromanctic anarchist dives under our shroud of happy-talk and hopium to stare it in the face as few other works do.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |