How I Put Myself through School
- How I Put Myself through School
There is a label specifically for organic meats and caviaron the refrigerator shelf of the woman whose house I clean.
Another on a rack for the well-traveled chardonnays and sauvignons,below the crystal champagne flutes, reminding me what goes where.
I systematize her cupboards and nail-clipping-infested junk drawer,while her children, the underweight, disobedient darlings, stare
as I reshelve their dolls and brand-new books. Stare as their motherstares. Stare as I pour the ajo y cebolla of my blood into a pot of rice
that will end up in the trash because of its spice. Stare as I shakethe wrinkles out of faded cotton panties and boxer shorts—
the lingering heat of the dryer taking me to a bedroomI never wanted to be in. Sweat beading at the bridge of my nose,
I accept the clothes she collects in trash bags for my daughterswho are younger but much bigger, knowing they will never fit,
and wonder, if she could, would she pierce the skin of my gut,scrape the eggs from my womb, spread them like a good Beluga, [End Page 308]
eliminating me and any other chance at adding to the fiery Chicanitaswho ask, Why do you take her used things, Mama?
Laurie Ann Guerrero was born and raised in the Southside of San Antonio. She was an Ada Comstock Scholar at Smith College and took her MFA from Drew University. A CantoMundo fellow and member of the Macondo Writers Workshop, Guerrero has served on the faculty at the University of the Incarnate Word, University of Texas–El Paso, Palto Alto College, and Gemini Ink, a community-centered literary arts organization in San Antonio. She was appointed poet laureate of San Antonio in 2014, and poet laureate of the state of Texas in 2016.
Note
Originally published in Meridians vol. 9, no. 1, 2009. A revised version of this poem was subsequently published in Guerrero's chapbook A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying (2013).
