Mudlark Poster No. 83 (2009)
Galicia 1986 | Nick Ripatrazone
Nick Ripatrazone’s work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, Sou’wester, The Los Angeles Review, and The New York Quarterly. He lives with his wife in northern New Jersey and is pursuing an MFA from Rutgers University.
Galicia 1986
1 I need to find my brother after I lower clothes down the well in a bucket slung from rope, tin clinking the slate walls. I know when it reaches water because a trill rides the jute and itches my wrists. While the laundry soaks, I draw wide-eared faces in dirt with arched sneakers, then drag the heavy clothes upward, rope wrapped around sleeves, never skin. I scrub goat milk soap along cotton, drub across washboards ridged like thin ribs. After three hours of full sun the shirts will become crispy, crinkled and starched. New forms. 2 I need to find my brother but Pablo twirls his finger in froth until beige foam settles into the cola. My stomach burns from lentejas left in the sun, a fleshy film swabbed across the top that tasted so sweet. Heat has a way of turning things. After cola comes café, tan and auburn swirls, sugar like gold, held to his teeth. Aguardiente shifts in the light. He points at the sun and looks straight into its glare, never having to squint. I have had enough of bright things. 3 I need to find my brother, not Dolores y Andrea. Their mother has two bull-brown cows, Chica and Paloma. We rub their round bellies but will never touch their udders, awkward and full. Pans pile in the barn coated from milk left in the sun; we could peel the white back like glue dried on a desk. Andrea has pink pastillas for her feet. Her mother burns the socks rather than washing them, stuffing the cotton into coals while the smell curdles under smoke. Those cows. Doe-eyed, and dumb. So heavy and sweating. 4 I need to find my brother though Francalina fills Coke bottles with milk, stuffs them in plastic bags printed with two Gallegos, fists raised. We still hate Franco but she keeps portraits of him, a new Jesus, olive skin oiled beneath the quartz chandelier. We swim in the irrigation tank, water a deep green, whirlpool from wind. Francisco wobbles to the trough. His left leg shorter than the right. He rifles pebbles at the pigs: one hit between their hot eyes will turn them wild. I watch him miss, then settle underwater, my eyes still open. 5 I need to find my brother, so I let Dolores y Andrea flap and flop. Swallow the tank water and wake with sore throats. Francalina will wrap ice rolled in a dishtowel round their necks. Sun dries me while I run past Tio Eulogio’s cherry and apple trees, patchworked pink and white. Crabbed apples bruised and purpled in dirt, balls of wet flesh, boiled and stringy. Stinking, stuck to my bare feet. The path curves through a carport, past a Vespa tattooed with Deportivo emblems, front tire sagged like heavy skin. 6 I need to find my brother. He is nineteen, and I know he is in La Ulfe, cigar smoke heavy like chocolate. Old men line dominoes across pocked tables and my brother’s girl leans against the window, skin on glass. Sophia is from Lisboa. Younger than Tomás, older than me, she connects us. He is loose with his words and leaves us, brushing elbows, carrying silent grudges, collected whims, claims her eyes wander. More than his eyes do: he finds a girl from Vigo, hair stuffed behind thin ears. 7 I need to know my brother but Sophia drags me outside. Behind the bar women drown dishtowels in a shallow pond: The one on the left, pregnant at fifteen, still carries a soft stomach. I fear such marks of sex, stretching of body. We run into the treeline where wild boars have been seen, patched hair spiked, showing pale, pink skin. Sophia says a boy was mauled last winter, his spine exposed like white rope. She does not look scared, does not need Tomás. I have made my choice. 8 I try to remember my brother while Sophia plucks moras from low branches, handfuls bleeding blue onto her violet dress. She licks her palms and I lay back on the ground, hands finding new leaves. Tomás squeezes my wrist and I wake to the cold; he smells of Vigo, warns me about eating anything wild. God, he is right, he knows the pain I feel, kneading my abdomen in front of the toilet. I lean against the hamper and pray for heat again.