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    All-American Girl
    All-American Girl
    All-American Girl
    Ebook83 pages37 minutes

    All-American Girl

    By Robin Becker

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    "It is Becker's undefendedness that makes this collection so strong and appealing. Whether acknowledging childhood privilege . . . or admitting her part in creating her own destiny . . . Becker's direct, fluidly accessible lyric narratives move assuredly through even the most complex emotional terrain, living with the questions, letting us know that we are with a speaker we can trust."—Women's Review of Books
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Pittsburgh Press
    Release dateFeb 8, 1996
    ISBN9780822979333
    All-American Girl

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    Reviews for All-American Girl

    3/5

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    • 4/5
      Becker's poems tell a story of heartbreak and peace-finding. I loved how small nuggets of each story/event she was talking about were woven through different poems, making it necessary to read all of them to get the full picture. I think I will need to revisit this collection sometime in the future.

    Book preview

    All-American Girl - Robin Becker

    SHOPPING

    If things don't work out

    I'll buy the belt

    with the fashionable silver buckle

    we saw on Canyon Road.

    If we can't make peace

    I'll order the leather duster and swagger

    across the plaza in Santa Fe,

    cross-dressing for the girls.

    If you leave I'll go back

    for the Navaho blanket

    and the pawn ring, bargain

    with the old woman who will know

    I intend to buy.

    If you pack your things,

    if you undress in the bathroom,

    if you see me for what I am,

    I'll invest in the folk art mirror

    with the leaping rabbits

    on either side, I'll spring

    for the Anasazi pot with the hole

    in the bottom where the spirit

    of the potter is said to escape

    after her death.

    If you say you never intended

    to share your life, I'll haunt the museum

    shops and flea markets,

    I'll don the Spanish riding hat,

    the buckskin gloves with fringe at the wrists,

    I'll step into the cowboy boots

    tanned crimson and designed to make

    any woman feel like she owns the street.

    If you never touch me again,

    I'll do what my mother did

    after she buried my sister:

    outfitted herself in an elegant suit

    for the rest of her life.

    THE CRYPTO-JEWS

    This summer, reading the history of the Jews of Spain,

    I learned Fra Alfonso listed holding philosophical discussions

    as a Jewish crime. I think of the loud fights

    between me and my father when he would scream that only a Jew

    could love another Jew. I love the sad proud history

    of expulsion and wandering, the Moorish synagogue walled

    in the Venetian ghetto, persistence of study and text.

    If we are the old Christ-killers on the handles of walking sticks,

    we've walked the earth as calves, owls, and scorpions.

    In New Mexico, the descendants of Spanish conversos come forth

    to confess: tombstones in the yard carved with Stars of David,

    no milk with meat, generations raised without pork.

    What could it mean, this Hebrew script,

    in grandmother's Catholic hand? Oh, New World, we drift

    from eviction to eviction, go underground,

    emerge in a bark on a canal, minister to kings, adapt to extreme

    weather, peddle our goods and die into the future.

    MY GRANDMOTHER'S CRYSTAL BALL

    Each summer we left Philadelphia

    where our sweltering fathers swore they could drive their Falcons

    around the rim of William Penn's fedora—a cast iron

    version of their own—gigantic and

    burning like a foundry in July.

    Silver swells rolled forward like machinery

    all day on the beach where we ran, five girl cousins too old

    to be naked to the waist and wild as boys.

    Late afternoon, the shadows of the great hotels

    painted the sand.

    After dark, our grandmother told us,

    the water reached out predatory fingers and pulled

    children under. Holding her hand, I heard hot, Dionysian laughter

    rise from a blanket and saw the sandy, suntanned legs

    of girls who sprinted up the stairs,

    outlined by neon ads for peanuts and piers

    that would, in a few years, disappear from Atlantic City.

    I watched the sultry girls dash across

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