Voices Through Skin
By Theresa Senato Edwards
Copyright 2012 by Theresa Senato Edwards.
Cover art by Christine Blu Ashton.
Cover design by Mona Z. Kraculdy.
Sibling Rivalry Press, LLC
13913 Magnolia Glen Drive
Alexander, AR 72002
ISBN: 978-1-937420-15-4
Smashwords Edition
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for my family
Doug, Troy, Richard and Carmen
and in loving memory of my parents
Tessie and Tony Senato
Even during war, moments of delicate peace
Arrive; ceaseless the water ripples, love
Speaks through the river in its human voices.
Muriel Rukeyser
“Letter to the Front”
CONTENTS
Back Seat, 1965, Forward, Back
October rain poured on the carriage house
Riot in the Local High School, 1975
Back Seat, 1965, Forward, Back
She looks through the top edge,
the new Ford Galaxy’s back window
fixates
on moving light
white balls,
giant pearl onions stuck to wooden posts.
She thinks on the moon’s placement
in the black sky, always where her eyes can see,
moon moves with the speed of car,
parallels
controlled by destination.
When
she’s older
she’ll meet “prince charming.”
Speeding world outside, she’s on
back seat counting. It’s safe to count, 1-2-3,
father, son, holy spirit, 1-2-3, father,
son, holy ghost, amen. She makes a tiny
sign of the cross in the air with her six-year-old
right index finger. She’ll walk with
a limp in nine years.
She always makes a swooping motion, outlining
movements needed to bless the air
inside the car. Bless the air inside the car
inside the car. Bless
the air
the air
inside the car.
She
reads books
likes to hear words in air. She
blesses the words, counting 1-2-3-
4, needs to even the odds she counts
to even the odds. Safe to count an
even number of words that dissipate into
back seat of car, Ford Galaxy,
moon from car moves faster than galaxies,
but she learns the moon is slow illusion
from back seat.
She’ll be a single mother for five years. Eat
only what her son can’t finish.
The American way in a Ford Galaxy
she’ll hydroplane at 17.
She wants
colors: Dunkin Donuts signs
comfort her,
remind her of coffee cups
filled with hot, sweet, milky coffee—
Remind her of home,
not thinking of fourth grade summer camp,
where she had to recite a prayer three times
or else—
dirty water dripping down
the washroom’s roof
contaminates her.
She thinks of this
staring,
fan grinding,
desk shaking,
in the small, clean room
she rents for the week.
Recite the prayer three times
because once
was never enough—
She sleeps five hours,
not enough time to feel like eating
breakfast with so many strangers.
She remembers reading
interviews of Holocaust survivors
(first-hand accounts).
Captives
drank hot, dirty, diluted brown,
frigid mornings
pressing—
stomachs hardening.
In response to Lori Schreiner’s paintings
of Auschwitz victim Czeslawa Kwoka
(photographed by Wilhelm Brasse) and in memory of Czeslawa
In Brasse’s black and white photos,
you are a young girl with a round face
dropped into a flat, grey world,
26947 sewn on a striped wardrobe,
naked beneath these numbers.
What does color bring to you?
In color you move through our minds.
In color you are a movie star: Mia Farrow—
slightly protruding upper lip, swollen bottom
forms a dense shadow to your chin.
In color you are a young woman
bleeding from within: pale skin
filters red to pink. This is the
girl you are at Auschwitz, Czeslawa.
You are not a criminal.
~
Your full color portrait
forces our reaction—
your hair is the warmest
fall in a dead winter, amber
background sparks the short, matted
bristles: adolescent questions
quickly extinguished when a scarf adds
texture, diagonal patterns, another
look of a 14-year-old prisoner.
In color you transform: we can
touch your swollen mouth, feel the
voice beneath the left side of your face,
where greys mix with pinks,
a rash of illness.
The contrast holds us.
~
In a soft color profile,
above and slightly right
of 26947, we see a tear
from your right eye spilling down,
just underneath skin transparent,
thin from a bleak setting.
We follow the contour of your
smeared mouth, slightly opened,
trace from lower lip to the
bottom of your chin:
this part of pinkish-grey flesh
appears as number 7.
This is not intentional.
~
In color we feel the
blacks of uniformity,
harsh marks of suffering
blacken the scratched
shadows below your nostrils.
The black slit above your
grey lower lip sucks us
empty—your eyes, black
oval platters reflecting
SS soldiers and worse
within deep, grey carvings.
Black is blacker in color.
~
Painted close-up: a bright
yellow backdrop brightens
the scarf’s pattern, your hair
hidden in black and white
becomes strands of sunlight,
movement on still life.
Yellows warm your cheeks,
your forehead clear of dirt,
yellows remove the dark patch
from the tip of your nose we see
in each of Brasse’s photographs.
Yellows plunge orange,
settle on the center left of your chest.
You can breathe them in.
She’d done absurd things as a child:
the counting of steps up stairways,
the repeating grip of the doorknob in her palm,
always going back to the knob,
going back to the corner of the door,
it had a notch in one of its grooves,
a smooth wooden pool of calm.
She’d rub a circle to the right,
outline the groove,
pray for resolve.
~
When she and her three year old
moved into their first apartment,
she decorated.
Inside the perfectly smooth door,
she gave her son a room
and looked for a hollow
space she could call home.
Ran her fingers down the wood
of every door,
closed eyes searching for indentation:
that invisible worry dump
to help with the nights