Feb. 21, 2022

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INTERLUDE

By Jasminne Mendez

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INTERLUDE

By Jasminne Mendez

Papi says we are what we do. With our hands. At age nine I curl my fingers around the shell of a coconut. He shows me how to use a machete. The blade turns and winks at me. We catch the sunlight. I wince, my hands afraid of the cut. Of the blood that could tremble or trickle down a knuckle. Papi says the machete is built for reaping and revolution, farming, and food. Papi names his machete. A tool. Like the hammer or the pen. He wraps his fingers around mine. We grip the machete. We raise it above our heads. Papi says do not be afraid of the machete. But I do not want to carry the weight of a weapon in my hands.

The name they give it is Scleroderma from the Latin meaning hard-skin. It thickens. Thick-skin is supposed to protect. Instead I harden and hurt all over. Tiny ulcers form and fester on the tips of my fingers. Cuticles blister, burn and erupt, a volcano of pus and blood the skin, the nail, the bone a slow decay of rotting cells that refuse to heal. There is nothing left to do but amputate. My wounds will be made by a scalpel. Not a machete. But I too will be cut. Pieces of me will also go missing. Where will they end up? When a foreign substance invades the body, the body attacks it. To try to heal itself. If that doesn’t work then you cut into the skin and drag the foreign substance out. But what happens when the body attacks itself? How do you heal when you are the weapon and the wound?

INTERLUDE

Image description: Four black and white CT scans of a ring finger. Each slide slices finger into smaller and small parts.

We call it a Rosary. I bury my hands in sand and pray. You do not need beads to pray. Ten fingers. Ten prayers or just one finger sliced ten times. Our father who art in heaven, like my father’s side of the family whose last name was and is del Rosario. Hail Mary, Nuestra Señora del Rosario patron saint of the city of Dajabón, pray for those who died on your feast day. Holy Mary mother of God, my mother prays the rosary over each one of my fingers every night before she goes to bed because there is no burial, ceremony, funeral, memorial or marker for a body part ripped from its root and sent down a river. Instead we name it limb and loss.

INTERLUDE

Una tijera colorada, a red scissor was used to cut the bandage off my surgically severed fingertip. The nurse unraveled the gauze. One single cross-stitch scar stretched across the bone. There would be no more wash, rinse, wrap, and repeat. There would be no more infection or gangrene. There would be no more fingertip, fingerprint, or nail. Just this––a phantom pain pulsing––the final remedy.

Jasminne Mendez is a Dominican-American poet, educator, playwright and award-winning author. Mendez has had poetry and essays published in numerous journals and anthologies including the YA anthology Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed (Flatiron). She is the author of two multi-genre collections: Island of Dreams (Floricanto Press, 2013), which won an International Latino Book Award, and Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e: Personal Essays and Poetry (Arte Público Press, 2018). Her debut poetry collection City Without Altar will be released in 2022 (Noemi Press) and her debut middle-grade novel in verse Aniana del Mar Jumps In (Dial) will be released in 2023. Her debut picture book Josefina’s Habichuelas (Arte Público Press) is out now. She has received fellowships from Canto Mundo, Macondo and the Kenyon Review Writer's Workshop among others. She is an MFA graduate of the creative writing program at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University and a University of Houston alumna.

Image description: Jasminne Mendez, an Afro-Latina with curly, light brown hair, wearing a peach, short-sleeved shirt and hoop earrings, stands with hand on hip in front of a blue and purple wall.

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