LUISA CAYCEDO-KIMURA on

Sandra Cisneros
My Wicked Wicked Ways “Preface”
​
Gentlemen, ladies. If you please—these
are my wicked poems from when.
The girl grief decade. My wicked nun
years, so to speak. I sinned.
 
Not in the white-woman way.
Not as Simone voyeuring the pretty
slum city on a golden arm. And no,
 
not wicked like the captain of the bad
boy blood, that Hollywood hood-
lum who boozed and floozed it up,
hell-bent on self-destruction. Not me.
Well. Not much. Tell me,
 
how does a woman who.
A woman like me. Daughter of
a daddy with a hammer and blistered feet
he’d dip into a washtub while he ate his dinner.
A woman with no birthright in the matter.
 
What does a woman inherit
that tells her how
to go?
 
My first felony—I took up with poetry.
For this penalty, the rice burned.
Mother warned I’d never wife.
 
Wife? A woman like me
whose choice was rolling pin or factory.
An absurd vice, this wicked wanton
writer’s life.
 
I chucked the life
my father’d plucked for me.
Leapt into the salamander fire.
A girl who’d never roamed
beyond her father’s rooster eye.
Winched the door with poetry and fled.
For good. And grieved I’d gone
when I was so alone.
 
In my kitchen, in the thin hour,
a calendar Cassatt chanted:
Repeat after me--
I can live alone and I love to . . .
What a crock. Each week, the ritual grief.
That decade of the knuckled knocks.
 
I took the crooked route and liked my badness.
Played at mistress.
Tattood an ass.
Lapped up my happiness from a glass.
It was something, at least.
 
I hadn’t a clue.
 
What does a woman
willing to invent herself
at twenty-two or twenty-nine
do? A woman with no who nor how.
And how was I to know what was unwise.
 
I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be happy.
What’s that? At twenty. Or twenty-nine.
Love. Baby. Husband.
The works. The big palookas of life.
Wanting and not wanting.
Take your hands off me.
 
I left my father’s house
before the brothers,
vagabonded the globe
like a rich white girl.
Got a flat.
I paid for it. I kept it clean.
Sometimes the silence frightened me.
Sometimes the silence blessed me.
 
It would come get me.
Late at night.
Open like a window,
hungry for my life.
 
I wrote when I was sad.
The flat cold.
When there was no love--
new, old--
to distract me.
No six brothers
with their Fellini racket.
No mother, father,
with their wise I told you.
 
I tell you,
these are the pearls
from that ten-year itch,
my jewels, my colicky kids
who fussed and kept
me up the wicked nights
when all I wanted was . . .
With nothing in the texts to tell me.
 
But that was then,
The who-I-was who would become the who-I-am.
These poems are from that hobbled when.

Luisa Caycedo-Kimura is a Colombian-born writer, translator, and educator. Her honors include a John K. Walsh Residency Fellowship at the Anderson Center, an Adrienne Reiner Hochstadt Fellowship at Ragdale, and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, Sunken Garden Poetry 1992-2011, RHINO, Diode, Shenandoah, Mid-American Review, Nashville Review, The Night Heron Barks, On the Seawall, and elsewhere. She serves as an Editor of Connecticut River Review, a board member of the Connecticut Poetry Society, and a member of the Hill-Stead Museum’s Poetry Advisory Committee.