Esteban Rodríguez
It was the mask I wanted more
than fame, the tight turquoise leather
tied with red shoestring around my nape,
the thought of being someone else
without being anchored to a face,
so as not to face the features in the face
that were slowly changing, growing
stranger by the year. And there was
the white complexion so different from
the darker shades of skin around me,
and the pimples unwilling to renounce
their loyalty, leaving me to reinvent
the candy-red bumps as chickenpox instead.
Even if I didn't know the one-hit wonder
of this disease, once I saw those Mexican
men fighting on TV, I couldn't care less
if anyone else believed it, if I, like them,
was putting up a front because a front
was the surest thing to guise myself in,
to carry my confidence further than
their choreographed jumps, than their lunges,
plunges, angelic dives, than the tiptoe
rope-walking as they back-flipped farther
into the ring, or as their sweaty bodies
began to sync with the crowd's shock
and awe, feed off their praise and screams.
And there I was, bouncing off my bed,
mumbling Spanish I could barely speak,
and hardly able to drop-kick, eye-poke,
cross chop, pile drive, head-butt, body slam,
brain-bust, somersault, shoulder claw,
slingshot or sleeper hold into my role
as rudo, the dirty-playing villain desperate
to pin the appearance I no longer wanted,
to wait for the count and finish off
with a headlock so I wouldn't have to take off
my mask, reveal to myself who I knew
I really was.
from the book DUSK & DUST / Hub City Press
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Photograph of Carmelite nun, Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit, who published as Jessica Powers
"The Nuns Who Wrote Poems"

"In the mid-20th century, several nuns like Sister Wolff and Sister Quinn were writing ambitious poems and publishing them in renowned magazines and newspapers. Their writing garnered awards and accolades. These women were not the first literary nuns....but something of a minor literary renaissance happened in mid-century America and abroad."
 
via AMERICA: THE JESUIT REVIEW
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Allison Cobb on Theodore Roethke's "I Knew a Woman"

"I encountered Theodore Roethke’s 'I Knew a Woman' in my teacher Rebecca Shankland’s high school English class. We read it alongside Wallace Stevens’ 'Emperor of Ice Cream.' These were probably the first two poems I had read from the twentieth century. They made poetry seem a living possibility to me, not something entombed in the past."
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