RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ

THE WOMAN WHO SEWED A SKIRT TO HER SKIN /
STUDY OF A HANGING WOMAN IN A RED DRESS

THE WOMAN WHO SEWED A SKIRT TO HER SKIN
Barcelona

The first stitch was accidental, an absent-minded dive into the hem on your lap,
the black line at home among the coarse hair growing back. What need to shave

when the fiery razor reminds you of the times your skin tore at the seam. This scar
from the scab you picked and picked remembered your fall on sharp flint,

and then the old ghost of healing knee. Doctor, before you lost your license
for kissing little girls beneath the bandages, you planted the painful print of your incisors

here, inside my thigh. At night, when I swallow my tablets, I gulp down your teeth.
You’re a grown woman even if the child kicks at the tangled weeds of your veins.

Her lost shoe rattles in your brain like the last place you forgot to search. Distract
yourself by mending the clothes men tear with their haste. They don’t know better,

unrehearsed in the designs of thread. The seamstress laughs at her secrets—thimbles
instead of nipples. Her crotch the warmest nest for the darning egg. Let me measure

you, good doctor, sir. I can break you down into inches. I can make a man of you
with buttons and a vest. I can crease the dignity right back into your spine. Madness

doesn’t begin to settle until the fifth stitch, when the rind of skin whitens with pockets
and the ink begins to bleed. In the tear ducts, the salty itch of daydream: childhood

house, the sanatorium where the nurses stumble with syringes down the stairs;
a window crushed against a field of stones but it will never crack. Out in the burial

grounds where the dead come apart like tattered bindings, the almond tree uproots
to dance for you, hiking up her dress fringed with worms. She greets you with her pale

foot, wriggling a dozen toes. How else will you stretch into infinity if not by looking
as if you never moved on to the next minute, wearing the same schoolgirl’s uniform

forever. You don’t fit into the skirt, but how it becomes you sewn onto your skin, paper
doll. The blouse next, sleeve hinging perfectly stitch by stitch along the arm. Don’t be

alarmed, my loving doctor. Oh, no, I’m not insane at all. I’m keeping your council
after years of hearing you whisper in my ear: “Bitch, pull yourself together.”

[reverse]

STUDY OF A HANGING WOMAN IN A RED DRESS

Years after her body swung from the thickest branch, your window keeps jumping
right off the wall to display the self-portrait of your old eccentric aunt, la tía María,

who slashed open the dark sky with a spill of her pretty dress. On that fateful night
you had thought about taking a picture, except there was no moon and the camera

had no flash, and your mother slapped herself all the way to her swinging sister,
cracking the artistry of the quiet study in red and black—la tía María swayed

calmly like the last row of pomegranates. She became so much part of the tree
you can’t imagine the tree without her and every season you expect the territorial

cardinal to fly back to nest only to be challenged by the red dress clinging there
like a sleeping bat. When la tía María died she claimed every other object that color—

cherry, rosebush, blood spot, lipstick and burgundy hat. The kitchen lost its tomatoes,
the mirrors bid farewell to plump tongues. Yours is the redless home with closets

muddled with redless clothes and yet everywhere the lonely hues of la tía María
mark the battles of her spinsterhood. Her body had stopped producing red

and that was the last suitor she could tolerate losing. The rugs grew heavy with
the ache of ovaries turned to stone and the light bulbs refused to cast the shadow

of a woman because they couldn’t see a woman in the slumped figure of la tía María
biting her knuckles from fever. And that’s the night she wounded God, by nailing

herself to the stars, just another self-imploding orgasm, just another phantom fireball.

[reverse]