Rodríguez looks and looks again at childhood, family, religion, and the Colonias of South Texas. Amidst the unincorporated residential areas along the US/Mexico border, these poems take root, rise up, and open their mouths to speak about what is found there.
And what did they write with their iron styli, / what complaints carve into his scholar skin
Seven schools in twelve years— / my childhood shifted pillar to post.
There is no way to separate a book published by 3: A Taos Press from its evocative layout. In this case, Carlson, Reed, and Dibella Seluja’s poetry collection, We Are Meant to Carry Water, takes for its cover image a sculpture by Lene Kilde, “The Nutmeg Princess,” part of The Molinere Underwater Sculpture Park near Grenada.
When this is over, your hair / will be to your waist and the curls / may be gone, the way they stretch / even now into loose waves I want / to bury my eyes into
Maybe the doctor thought thus when she ordered / the cesarean, cutting in before Nature could bare / her jagged red-tinged teeth.
My nephew says seeing a cardinal means / there’s a soul nearby, so I wonder who’s flitting / from the red oak to the neighbor’s fence / to watch us at this vacation house.
The fish tank / / hummed, as their fish-eyes bulged into two drunk uncles leering at our / see-thru nightgowns, with flammable gills.
I needed to be a part of something—anything, a neighborhood—a community, glued together like dark red nail polish dripped dried on white bathroom tile, a messy blob of circumstance reborn.
Psaltery & Lyre 