Poems by Carine Topal​

El Pesero                                                                
                       
I was plumage and filigree/ each part of me unchartered//  I was the last stone of the
day//  I was three streets down from a liturgy/  arcos y arboles held me up to the traffic
of trolleys and coches//  I was gold/   a bounty/  lifting my dress to my knees/ boarding
the pesero/ inching toward the back seats alive with violets/ faldas billowing from the
small waists of the 3 girls standing in the aisle/  Alejandro and I grabbing the handrails
running across the ceiling/  picking at the sweet galletas my mother had baked that
morning/  the roads narrow and pocked with holes/  the clickety click of the bus puffing
its way toward Coyoacán/  everything  everyone moving with a dull slow speed/  the
passengers suddenly tipping off their benches/  fell one on top of the other and the
handrail I held onto gave in/  it was upside down of everything with flesh floating/
flimsy orchids torn from stalks/  cabbages  sweet mansanas  flores amarillas/  broken
parts of boys and babies/  the sky unhinged as arms and scarlet wings/  a trinity of girls
glided out a window/  bits of steel moved through me/  a colony of broken bones sired
by a trolley/  my spine  mis costillas   pelvis   right foot  the  bleeding that could not yet
be seen/  that rod through me and a sound like nothing I could name came from me
when a stranger pulled from my body a piece of the bus/  there was lightning and fire/
I was forever supina/  my back my bed my back mi vida/  and that is how I made my
way

 Frida Kahlo, September 17, 1925       

​

Dear America,
 
You know who you are in Madison and Tamarack, Ohio,
whose milk and cheese you wear. You out in the sweet Hudson
Valley or Roanoake, where green hills and defense cross
pollinate in sectors. And you, Detroit, know the spit-shine
of a scuffed wingtip and the pylons of a railroad.
You, cross-country, county clerk below a painted sky in Taos,
as if you knew the color of water, woke up just like city boys
as if, once awake, you didn’t know who’s pulling your pants
down and have you waddle and quack to get your wages.
What now that the fertile central valley of us,
Madera and Merced, is veined with grief and empty beet fields,
since a new squalor is sheriff in town, braggadocio as moon-shine
in a Bullitt County package store, as if woe and its’ teardrops,
the mountain roads and its breezes, the river its current,
the dusty sky and blue waters weren’t sullied. By him.
This is your home now, scent of your greatest failure.
Morning hour, welcome home.

Carine Topal, a native New Yorker, earned her MA from NYU. She participated in the grassroots organization California Poets in the Schools, was the Poet-in-Residence for the city of Manhattan Beach and Poet-in-Education for Manhattan Beach elementary schools. She was awarded a residency at Hedgebrook, a fellowship in St. Petersburg, Russia, and has conducted poetry workshops at the VA Hospital in Los Angeles. She’s the recipient of the Robert G. Cohn Prose Poetry Award, The Briar Cliff Poetry Award, and numerous other prizes. Her 6th and newest collection is Dear Blood (Ben Yehuda Press). She currently teaches in Los Angeles and the Southern California desert.

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