Author’s note: âTripasâ is a long poem focusing on my Chicana grandmother Pastora Mendoza and her work on the line at a Motorola plant in Phoenix, Arizona. In her 30-year career, my grandmother would eventually inspect components that were assembled in some of the first cellular phones. Examining the fused wiring between Spanish, Chinese, and English, the poem enacts a kind of âtelephoneâ between the three languagesâthus echoing my own experience growing up with a mix of my familyâs languages as a primarily heard rather than written phenomenon.Â
Tuning not lute but car radio,
Cocteauâs Orpheus copies out
an underworldâs broadcasts
for his poems. Not quite Aeolian,
the componentry is similar
to that circuitry my nana made:
turntable to radials, Motorola,
from Victrola, wired sound
in DeSotos. A cielo of signalsâ
his mastery over sound, Orpheusâ
ruin was finally in what he
couldnât see. So many Eurydices:
citing small hands, the factory
praised women on the line
for deft fingers inside chassis.
DictĂ©e to Hellâs transmissions,
what was Orphic in those diodes
women clocked-in to fastened?
*
Edison, the Zacatecan
in Judy Bacaâs mural âThe Great Wall,â
has a Chichimecaâwith hips
a comet-tail of field cornâ
whispering in his oreja
the secrets of the light bulb.
At VTech in Guangdong
workers protest 15-hour days & sub-
standard wage by writing
on the bathroom wallsâ
returning then to stations to fasten
earpieces on cordless phones.
In situ, tibishi etched
into Angel Islandâs barrack rooms
make ears of detention
walls: âthe ocean/changed
into a mulberry grove/Impetuously,
I threw my writing brush away.â
*
Speaking of poetryâs sources,
Spicer cited quasars
âquasi-stellar radio, traveling
billions of lightyears.
I remember Orionâone slick
matador, TiĂł called himâ
up on South Mountain,
leaning over those radio towers
red-eyed with warning
& somehowâby frequency
by transmissions I vaguely knew
âdrunk with music.
Working graveyard, sheâd rest
beside me after putting me
to bed, lighting then one
Parliament to smoke before
heading inâeach drag like
tower light to planes overhead.
*
I see spinning in quinceañera
the record player
she bartered for in â49â
cajoled (chingona) her mother
to buy rather than a party
or a newly sown dress.
On the spindle, she dropped
45s like a seamstress
sets the Singerâs bobbin
Pythagoras with shears
halved the lyreâs string
for harmonyâa distance
we call octave. I remember
switching the RPMsâhow voices
deepened or sang shrill.
I hear her foot keep the beat.
A treadle might spin a track.
Wax too once made wings.
Brandon Som is the author of The Tribute Horse (Nightboat Books), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the chapbook Babel’s Moon (Tupelo Press), winner of the Snowbound Prize. He was the Anne Newman Sutton Weeks Poet-in-Residence at Westminster College, and was awarded fellowships at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and Civitella Ranieri. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego.