All-American Girl
By Robin Becker
3/5
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Reviews for All-American Girl
3 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Becker'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