Illustration by Caitlyn Hasenfratz
You ask for more than rent. Rather, the cost of this room, any amount of room, is an exhaustive act of pruning. All aspects of my presence: my voice too loud, my gait staggering, the music that propels me unnerving. You talk of parades in Boystown–I, funerals in Gary. You, massage school for a summer–I, a South Side inipi. But in retorting with wounded looks, you signal the impertinence of–even when solicited–sharing. For, in invoking such forsaken peripheries, those spaces staked out in the shadow of heavy industry, the dazzle of the nightclubs you visited is marred by a lumpen acidity. And worse, such reflux embodied: in the blast furnace squall of my voice, in Six Foot Seven Foot stomping gaudy triumph in the bathroom, in my barrio lope that careens through the efficiency–all these resurrections of imagined hells that puts at wit’s end your coping.
So, with nothing to share: demands. In a barrage of texts you demand that I ask permission to have people over, though I wish only to feed them, to share with them my love and with it a slice of my history. For if I bring such discomfort on first meeting, then what does the company I keep have in store? Yet, you poke your nose in whenever I’m cooking, despite finding the stock that cultivated it unsavory. And then, you eat around the chicken in the frijoles negros al indios I’ve been making all day, a dish I’ve been cooking with my pa since my nose first rose above the counter, an anecdote that insinuates my family’s barbarism, that a child would be trusted with a knife, that to hold one’s own would be considered the most precious of gifts.
If Flatbush froths with swaying hips, the Village is a rapid of tutting eyes
send sight to the sky and maybe loose yourself from the futile search for a
cranial shell
Yet You choose covered by the canopy
creaking swings and a pavilion cordoned to a private café
Not that when beckoned you abstained from contorted oaks
or spurned the hustle of docks rumbling with combustion
Frijoles negros al indios is not a proper dish. Rather, it is what we call it, as it is simply my family’s take on beans and rice, cheap and flavorful, but with centuries of flare. It reminds me of St. Jude’s Catholic Worker House, where my pa found space to make a medley of all those peripheries. A shelter in the most permissive sense, St Jude’s stood as if the lady who lived in a shoe made her nest in a hollowed out boulder, straddled by a row of Section 8 bungalows. In the cramped, industrialized kitchen was a smattering of notices: defunct rules and schedules, contact information for folks that had long flown the coop, inside jokes on post-it notes alluding to bygone landings. My pa lived in the basement, his room sheetrocked off from the freestore where cluttered shelves lifted from the sidewalk criss-crossed, aisleless, on the concrete floor.
When the cops shut down the tent city in the backyard, he began his battle with the walnut tree, mapping out plot by plot the meals he’d teach me. He’d make overtures to any and all comers to grab a split-handled shovel from the shed and help him in tending, but regardless of whether one sweated with him in the back, come Sunday there’d be a plate for them, waiting. So on Sundays it had to be all hands on deck, and frijoles negros al indios made use of everything. From morning, we made sure there was a steady flow of coffee as we prepped black beans, peppers, tomatillos, garlic, and maize from our garden, maize dried and washed and limed by the five gallon to make hominy, to foster a bounty in that buried corner of the basement set aside for pickling and preserving. No, we did not grow the onions, we got them from the Food Co-op dumpster. Same for the rice; for though we had what felt like an acre, it was not near enough for a paddy. Only a few mounds that we turned over spring after spring, weeding away the Creeping Jenny, the used needles and the stray Natty tabs, the banks outlined with cayenne and tobacco juice to keep the rabbits at bay, my pa even springing for fox urine when his disability check made it to the end of the month. All his pride living vital in the mud, wafting its fragrance, its corporeality from the basement, to be rendered further in the kitchen, every free surface used as a counter to ensure the table could be piled with enough to share unconditionally—in order to commemorate his life force spent, and then redouble it in channeling not just Sundays, but a procession of impromptu feast days, what else could he spend money on but lupine piss?
Sore knot for felt seared even when subsumed in popping snares
even whilst stamping feet, a giddy horse huffing chili exhaust
Making medicine by laying hands on flesh drained of blood
watched, though alone
for the sanctity feels a sin
a witchcraft lifted not from the shelves of Barnes & Noble
but ignobly bequeathed
Even when it meant surreptitious assembly
such continuance of kin binding limbs to the chopping block
And then, when he could no longer stand on his own, I’d do my part in shouldering. My bit of the mantle was turning the dirt, any patch thick headed with grass an intentional reprieve, a tempered fallowness not of neglect, but well earned recovery. While I’d swing the hoe over my scrunched shoulders, my pa would sort through heirloom kernels, poking holes while cracking jokes about how he was once again playing in the dirt, not stooping to, but relishing the mess of making mud pies, crawling around in maneuvers that evaded careless smothering. The way down to the garden from the Worker House was a chop of uprooted brick, turning excursions intrepid as he held fast to the brunt, waving off crooked elbows as long as he could reach. But he would see beyond the elbow, as without it he could not reach what his grandmother, my great grandmother, passed down to him–what was left of our history. And he’d look up from his cross-legged mischief always with this look of defiance, of glee at being covered in soil, those ashes composted and bearing all the blessings born of having never forgotten himself for the comfort of a wasicu. And he would not let this guidance, this encouragement in conversation with earth, ancestors, and all relatives die with him, but would hold it in stride, for he was certain it would carry him from age to age, and be passed to me, maybe, given I grew the stomach for it. Given, when separated, him and I, that I could source the right nourishment.
“Suss out”, genealogy: suspect
withering gums flap tanned pearls when hairs lax from ends
sunned by tobacco and coffee and whiskers singed to let no puff languish on concrete
but now sealed for wished waxen has hampered such victuals as soiling
So I wake, early. I rise, I smoke, I make coffee, I pray, and I shower. I slice chicken even though I worked til 2 the night before—where else but in a kitchen, it being Sunday. I dance, I shake my hips, all legs and no ass, massaging with my whole body, not just my hands: lime, cumin, ancho powder, and adobo rojo into the thighs, smiling with gratitude for what will give this life to me in this meal as I try to welcome this new city. Working my way into this one spot where I have steady claim for room, though to stay unobtrusive I keep my headphones on, for even if not the sonic hell you ascribe to Lil Wayne, but a soft lament indignant to despondency, it would track hell can be imagined on Halsted, too, Paranoia simmering as the reaper descends through summertime. And you interrupt me, as I connect with my ancestors and release the shared trauma of America’s abandoned corners through my body in my hips, through my mouth in the lyrics, through my ears in the production, through my hands in the massage, through my eyes in watching the marinade slowly work itself in, all to make room for the tenderness I wish reflected in my heart.
By what?
By flesh lived as writhing from soil for a kiss from extinct stars
and voice bellowing many-mouthed an affront
as it is not isolated to a make believe One
To save face, I take the reins of your emergency, a matter I must wash my hands for though it only requires the patience I could spend prepping. Then, I pour myself out into this cheap cut to get its bone for broth, the skin for chicharrones de pollo, the fat for oil, to let the meat marinate and become primed for fond, to build the base for the food you will pick around as I grit through my own two-faced tolerance of customary hospitality. This cheap cut that you would walk past in the Trader Joes, not the tienda I visit to gather the ingredients I need for this dish. This refuse I take pride in, same as my pa with the St. Jude garden, this reclamation that must be treated with care and wisdom to tease out its startling beauty. This blessing that brings me a sense of home since I have strayed from Yard and Blight to the opulence of the Megalopolis, in the hope I may discover something essential in myself, something I have yet to offer my relatives, bearing home with me all the way. This blessing that you take as a folly, an eccentricity only deemed more than an inconvenience due to its alignment with your tastes, though the manner in which it is borne instills you with fear. These tastes I must step around, but not too confidently, for then my feet could be heard through the floorboards.
A community cannot prefer, only live out an ever unfolding truth
to lie is to condemn myself to an illness I haven’t the countenance for
So only silence can meet your preference, charged with static of grating
tolerance
For I will not sin for the sake of another’s fear
that cannot be faced save gagging the confronting with a paling veil
I know I am refuse. I know I can make do with cracks filled with scraps. I have survived and thrived in the cracks my whole life, and have found a beauty there you will never know. But you cannot pick around home. Maybe your home, but not my home. I can throw the doors wide–and often do so with open arms–but to refuse a beam–whether it be a corpulent bird or a hi hat trill–is to cripple such a font to its foundation. For it comes from the depths of my soul, indivisible and not mine, but inherited slowly over time with no recipe to speak of, only a dance rediscovered over and over with folkish steps, a memory recognized when lived out with abandon. I cannot choose what bubbles up from this stew. Even for me, it is always subsumed in mystery, in an unearthing, and that is what makes me tend to it so. I can take being refused. But I cannot respect anyone who thinks my history is a matter of preference. No, I cannot respect anyone who thinks I can wash my hands of the fecund mud I was born into, having only bobbed and weaved past sharpened sticks by virtue of all my fellow bottom feeders that supported me. For all us bottom feeders, we know how to dance, how to crack light, how to cook the food you only would order via delivery–even as customers, you think we talk too loud, bobbing our heads to rhythms clanged from a fictitious hell as we’re chewing. We who bring plates come feast, and who know we needn’t beg in times of famine—we know how to celebrate, not commiserate about the latest offering. So refuse me. But don’t eat my fucking cooking. And definitely don’t eat around this indulgence of meat. If you can’t stomach the chicken, so fearful of accepting me and all that came before me, then surely such soul would give you indigestion.
I will not corner myself into atonement
for capitulating to a foreign cowardice
having been shown how to cure in the kitchen
with such bountiful remembering