Beasts Behave in Foreign Land

Ruth Irupe Sanabria

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781597095778
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Winner of the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize

Ruth Irupé Sanabria's second collection of poetry, Beasts Behave In Foreign Land examines the internal landscape of a family confronting the psychological and emotional aftershocks of genocide and exile. Drawing on her personal experience during Argentina's military dictatorship (1976 to 1983), these poems emerge from the defining moment in which she had the opportunity to testify in the trials against the Fifth Army Corps in Bahia Blanca, thirty-seven years after soldiers kidnapped, tortured, and imprisoned her parents. Weaving metaphor, ekphrasis, and voice, Sanabria's poems pay tribute to the ways women in her family use art, music, and testimony to process the unspeakable and confront profound loss. Written in two sections and set in various cities throughout Argentina and the United States, the poems in Beasts Behave in Foreign Land explore the insistence and resiliency of love.

I

The Collapse of Greta Oto, the Transparent Revolutionary Butterfly

The EMT administered as much salvia as he thought her body could process

but she kept driveling on about salvation and memory.

Earlier that week a concerned citizen had snitched.

The report read that she was ruining the landscape with her limp-winged hobble.

No one could ask her about her day; she kept yammering,

“Some confuse salvation and saving souls

with managing the massive emptiness in the yards.

Memory is spayed.

Nothing flowers robust and sweet.”

She had been captured easily.

Like all minds that surrender, she had always struggled with her proclivity

to be limp-winged but had managed it well until the day she sunk

into an editorial reveling in the recent death of her mother

and condemning her mother’s compañeros for revering “the ‘fire of subversion,’

the way deer venerate the sweet, dark-pink flesh

and smooth, sturdy canes of a thorn-less raspberry bush.

When the Beast of Memory spews his fire, may they all burn!”

Now, strapped down to the stretcher, spiracle mask fogging up,

there was no point in holding back truth when the Admitting Chair asked

what she thought about fire, so she confessed: her heart feared

the transmutation of an era into a fragment of a puzzle.

“It says in your chart that your first and only mission

through the Throat of Silence landed you here,”

the Admitting Chair mumbled while checking the strength of her thorax.

“Mining Memory’s Throat is a solitary practice, only in theory,”

he whispered so as to not be overheard, then closed the chart and scuttled away.

A window came in and placed an extra blanket on her bed. “Here, just in case.”

“Window,” she called out, “My caterpillars? The fire? The Beast of Memory?”

The window upped the oxygen, leaned in, “Breathe up.

You’ve got to abandon that ‘work.’ With wings as transparent as yours,

you have no business mining Memory’s Throat.

Who’s going to pull you from the long silence next time?”

“But, my babies. Did they make it?”

“You need to sort your realities if you want to get out of here.”

Mother’s Milk

Attach to me like a wiggling piglet.

Suckle, and suckle, and suckle.

I have not killed a hen,

much less walked to the butcher

since the doctor pulled you out and onto me.

Like a parenthesis trying to form an O, your legs stay bowed.

Son, slow animals are killed in a flash.

Doctors prescribe the sun

to calcify you straight.

Here, my piglet, my nipples dry themselves out.

Ordinary cow’s milk will not do.

A bit of warm brandy in your bottle

for the battle you’ll walk.

And now, for the battle you’ll walk

I will turn my back to you.

Listen. These are my hands and this is the sound

of straight bones and strings bending to my intention.

If sun and brandy won’t heal you,

son, music will.

Seconds before Giving Her Testimony, the Witness Requests a Glass of Water to Quell the Voices Planted in Her on the Day the Soldiers Came for Her Family

“Begin with: this is the only picture I have of the three of us together.”

“Put that away! The carrion needs to rest.”

“Don’t be a pussy. Look at the photo.”

“Now that’s that face of a mother who would rather be anywhere else but at her daughter’s first birthday.”

“Do you even know the names of the soldiers on trial?”

“Your mother shaved her legs and wore a dress that day.”

“Don’t mention your father. For his sake.”

“Tell the judges how mirrors grow down your mother’s spine; how her neck is the long bending neck of an old adolescent, a new mother, a narcissist.”

“Don’t be a self-absorbed cunt. Focus on the grenades, the helicopters, and the moment of kidnapping. Keep the mommy issues for your bourbon.”

“How do you say ‘Your Honor’ in Spanish?”

“Since we’re on the topic of honesty, you should mention that your mother never loved your father like that. She needed him. To get out of her father’s house. Sadly, she got knocked up on her honeymoon.”

“First of all, no one wants to hear how you two are as warm and fuzzy with each other as a pair of frozen steaks. Even if it is relevant to the case.”

“And squeeze as much eloquence as you can from your Spanish.”

“Your mother braided all of her resilience into your umbilical helix of breath and memory. You’ll do fine.”

“Focus: the flashbacks, the exile, the silence.”

“Bleh. The skeletons are on parade. Again.”

“Testifying validates the historical and political significance of the individual’s experience. Howev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• I
• II