The Verging cities and the many mouths

Prominently featured through The Verging Cities was the image of the mouth. In Mouth in my Kitchen, the mouth is a wound. “I stared at its cracked—it was silent. I asked: Mouth are you dying?” I liked this line in particular because its use of the em dash as a closed mouth, or, the cracked line of a silent mouth, a mouth detached from the body, residing somewhere above, a scar.

            And the mouth is a wound: it’s a huge orifice exposing the interior of the body, and it bleeds. There’s so much corporeal imagery in this book, the body takes on the role of the verging cities, and the body is quite often torn to pieces.  But I really felt the emphasis on the mouth. In A Mass Grave Washed, the whole body is reduced to mouths: “Out of the earth // a thousand mouths surface, open / lipped and teething from the ground / that held them… An armpit: a mouth. A knee: another mouth. The eye: a mouth // of teeth. The ear a mouth of hair.” Things emerge from mouths and things are put in mouths: there’s swallowing, choking, vomiting, cacti, eggs, fences, cities, people, all consumed and subsumed by mouths.

            In I Light the House on Fire and Lie down, the body has geography: “the ants form the contours of your face—geography of a body I cannot begin to measure.” The body and the self are separated, and as in A Mass Grave Washed, It’s the Heat that Wakes us, and A Place to Hide the Body, land and body are one and the same. It’s crazy going through these poems looking for body imagery and finding it in every single one, there’s just bodies everywhere in this book and it’s kind of overwhelming. I feel like I’m at the point where, if I were an archeologist looking for trilobites and ferns, or if I were a girl trying to pick a guerrero pear, would I be able to look at the severed head of another human and say “that’s a woman” or “that’s a man”? How would I perceive their remnants, and be able to say “there’s a person” as if it’s easier to conceptualize personhood through fragments? “I am frightened of bodies dried // to bone. These once were people, but I can’t imagine them,” (A Mass Grave Washed). The flood of dismembered bodies disorients from personhood: how is a disembodied mouth in the desert also a person with clothes, and does it have a voice? At what point is a body so divided and scattered that it’s no longer human? And how does the division of land, which here is so intimately a part of body, become the division of body?  And can any of the pieces be put back together?

         Scenters-Zapico writes poems that feel like pieces of human body and pieces of land and other materials are patched together to make a picture of a person that feels like a grotesque collage. Like in A Torero’s Daughter is Killed, the corpse of the daughter is a white dress, lace, a rope-braid, mud, a broken skull, and a “mouth open as a bull’s eye”. Are these pieces really how we construct our ideas of a person, and how accurate a picture are we getting from these collected fragments? Scenters-Zapico’s work is surreal and evocative, the shards of the human body mixing with the world is unifying in that it connects people to each other and the land, but it’s patchwork representation of bodies also illustrates the irreparable damage created by deep divisions of land and body.