Sarah Gord Blog 5

In several of these poems, childhood and the place the speaker grew up are so intertwined that they almost become one and the same. This is especially true in “Ashes,” which feels like a love letter to a personified L.A. In this poem, the “you” being addressed is literally the place where the speaker grew up, a place that he used to idolize and still deeply admires. He says, “I thought you / were beautiful,” the past tense (“thought”) making the poem seem reminiscent and wistful. The poem feels like an address to a past lover (calling the city beautiful, establishing an “us”), and is split into the past (before the fire, and perhaps before he grew up) and the “now,” when he “notice[s] your littered streets.” Still, however, he seeks to transform this “litter” with his own poetry and desperately wants to reclaim and reinvent what he loved so much about where he grew up. He wants to relieve the place from pain; he refers to “the breath you have held for too long” as though he intends to take away some of the strain and struggle from the city itself. Of course, a city cannot actually hold its breath, but the personification makes the city feel alive. The speaker has transitioned from being taken care of by the city to taking care of the city, perhaps also a transition from childhood to adulthood.

In “Directions to My Imaginary Childhood,” the specificity of place (and, by definition, the speaker’s “imaginary childhood”) almost becomes satirical. The early instruction to “wait for an orchid colored minibus with seven oblong doors, / open the fourth door” feels totally over the top, and yet it rings true to the way that people deliver verbal instructions. The unironic manner in which the speaker deliver the directions contrasts with the absurdity of the directions themselves. This is clear in the line, “the oscillating electric fan / will be driving,” where something unreal is presented as normal.

The repetition of the word “if” in the poem unhinges the certainty of the directions; on the one hand, it is clear where the reader (or the assumed “you”) is supposed to go, but on the other hand, there are several scenarios where reality may diverge.

At the end of the poem, it appears as though the directions were leading the reader not to a specific place but to a house that is somehow also a book. The “house with an acknowledgements page / and an index” blurs the line between the real and the imagined/written in a compelling and disconcerting way. Inside this house/book, the “you” is meant to “enter / this page and look me in the eye.” Is the speaker referring to the page the reader is currently reading? Or the page where they are meant to arrive after following these peculiar directions? Or are they somehow one and the same?

Growing up is also rooted in family and in the people who have come before us. The speakers in both Mikhail and Martinez’s poems highlight the significance of their grandmothers in forming the successive generations (and the ways that previous experiences informed the grandmothers themselves). Both speakers refer to scars and the physical markings left behind that remind the speaker of past pain and inform what the future might look like. The final line in “My Grandmother’s Grave,” “My hand on the map / as if on an old scar” highlights the connection between place (map), memory, and the current day (“my hand [now] on the map”). Likewise, the final line in “Heredities (1) Etymology” is “She told me this, then showed me two scars on her throat—tiny scars, like two eyelids stitched closed.” The grandmother in this poem directly presents the memory to the speaker (and, by extension, the reader), as though she does not want the speaker to forget where she came from and how it might inform the speaker’s experience.