Lima :: Limón, Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s second book of poetry, is filled with the oppressive complexities experienced by women raised along the U.S.-Mexico border. In the initial epigraph, apprehension about what the female body must endure is established with lyrics borrowed from Conchita Piquer’s title-inspiring song, “Lima Limón” — a voice which opens the book by declaring: “You have no one to love you.” With an unflinching gaze, Scenters-Zapico depicts a reality for Latinx fronterizas who have endured disappointment, abuse, and femicide in the El Paso-Cuidad Juárez region. However, she does so while acknowledging the generations of women who have sewn together traditions of resistance and resilience in the face of misogyny and machsimo. As the title suggests, you can’t have one reality without the other — the lima without the limón, passion without suffering, migration without home — and it is in this comparative borderland that the women occupying these poems are portrayed in their divided search for wholeness.
In a series of five prose poems titled “Macho :: Hembra,” violence haunts the language and imagery, as each poem references visible and invisible wounds inflicted by a Mexican “macho” on his “hembra” — terms in Spanish which denote the masculine and feminine biology of an animal, suggesting a bestial relationship:
A man whispers in my ear: I want to break you & I think I am in love. I accept/ machismo. Hembra is to let men bite your mouth until it bleeds. Hembra/ is to witness your thighs cut to stars by the thrusts of men. Hembra is/ to know sex is a blind flicked shut … Machismo is not about walnuts waiting to be peeled, chiles turned soft,/ pomegranates thrown on a plate to be served to your macho. Machismo/ is men as animals hunting: kiss her neck, crack it, still her under/ your chin.
Here, the prose poem elevates the content of the poem rather than the poet’s syntactic choices, revealing an unforgiving world in which men and women are tethered by strict expectations. The prose poem’s elemental form lets the speaker strip down any potential for romanticized mystique between the “macho” and his “hembra,” leaving only the bluntness of their truth to be witnessed: a woman who has been broken to accept her abusive male partner’s rigid demands. The box in which the “macho” and “hembra” operate is less fluid and dynamic, embodied by the closed-off spacing of prose writing, with no room for movement beyond the traditional construct and no space to break free or even shift. The constant struggle between domesticity — created by images of the woman’s desire to prepare and serve food — and brutality, exemplified by allusions to the man’s hunger and aggression — is developed in this sequence of a few tightly written sentences that utilize simple nouns and verbs to build conflicting tensions within the relationship. The voice quickly creates a scene bordered by “sex” and “hunting,” “love” and “bleed[ing],” highlighting the extremities that define basic limitations for women living along a machista frontera. In this space, there is no barrier between having your neck kissed, then having it broken; between opening your body to affection only to have it “cut” by violent thrusting. Then, there is the confession of a woman’s violent conditioning: “I accept machismo.”
Although the voice seems submissive and disinterested in challenging the macho’s authority in certain poems, at other times Scenters-Zapico honors the subversive potential of language and the woman’s body. This is achieved in poems that contrast men as static villains with women as dynamic agents of transformation. In “Women’s Work,” the speaker exhibits how her body functions as not only an object serving the relentless needs of males, but also as a vehicle to fulfill the woman’s own sustenance among tables of “strangers”:
... I work to make/
my body a comfort. My body:
the table where strangers sit to be served
as king in a court of cross-stitched
felons. Each felon with a needle’s prick
assassin down the highway of my legs.
Here, a clever undermining of the male’s place deepens with each line. The speaker begins with “I,” quietly establishing a sense of autonomy to create “comfort” in a place where it is usually denied. Then, in repeating “my body” to begin and close the second line, there is reclamation of the woman owning herself, even if it’s only to serve false kings who are “cross-stitched” and stealing their way around her body. As the poem progresses, her body becomes “the table” on which the men are dependent for their sustenance, thus making her less of an object and more a source of their livelihood. She suggests that these men see themselves as more worthy than they actually are — cheaply fabricated illusions of power — with nothing more than “needle[s]” that “prick” and a dependence on the service of a woman. It is with this depiction of duality that Scenters-Zapico’s poems on machismo most shine, offering a celebration of how women invert power dynamics to sustain resilience in a place where kidnappings, sex trafficking, and murders occur at will to narco activity.
Scenters-Zapico is aware of how her poetry may or may not perpetuate false narratives or hyperbolic stereotypes of life along the border. She counters this dangerous possibility by directly inserting herself into the very themes and spaces she writes about — occasionally writing metacognitively about poetic craft when describing the lives of real women at risk. She even calls out the outsiders who treat the border as a simplified warzone of news coverage. In various poems (“Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo, México” and “Macho :: Hembra,” for example) she alludes to her own upbringing within the borderlands, her participation in a simulated border crossing, and being the victim of abuse. In “Aesthetic Translation” she criticizes white male reporters like Charles Bowden who have misrepresented the experiences of women in these areas, writing “Femicide,/ Charles Bowden wrote, was an hembra/ lie about machos — a myth.” By calling him out, Scenters-Zapico counters patriarchy as the dominant voice by sharing first-hand testimonies from women who have actually experienced those dangers, yet have been silenced by cultural gender norms and mainstream media biases. At one point, the book unexpectedly enters into metapoetics and the speaker’s own guilt by reflecting on the morality of how one can write about the oppression of brown women in a way that honors their experience without exaggerating or profiting from their experiences. “The Women Wear Surgical Masks” expresses the poet’s reservations:
How do you explain
Femicide to someone who has never heard
the word? The New York Times said the women
look like ghosts, but I’ve never known
breathing to be so audible. By feeding
the children first, the women break
the fast. No one comes to serve them
& no one cries at this routine. This
is an unbeautiful poem — uncrafted
with sterile diction. I don’t want to turn
these women into an aesthetic. I have
failed. That last line break shows I still
want to build tension, but the pain
in my feet from marching with these women,
the sour taste in my mouth from wearing
a surgical mask with these women as a woman,
may never leave me. This poem, my failed
re-creation — their protest a failed resuscitation.
The contemplative and unbeautified nature of this poem underscores ethical issues of writing about femicide. Although she claims to resist artful intentionality, the poem maintains craft and line work at a masterful level, a contradiction that creates tension. Although she wants to avoid “aesthetic,” her enjambments occur at pivotal moments, creating surprise and layering emotions to imply multiple meanings — clearly artful and intentional. She asks: how do you communicate with those who cannot hear, who do not perceive universal struggles, who refuse to question injustice, in a way that is not simply for art’s sake? With these declarations, the book attempts to cross beyond the borders of poetry into human documentation, at times concerned more with the integrity of the subject matter rather than that of poetic formality. Nevertheless, “I don’t want to turn / these women into an aesthetic. I have / failed.”
Mostly brutal, occasionally tender, and sometimes insurgent, Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s Lima :: Limón is as hostile and beckoning to be crossed into as the U.S./Mexico borderlands it explores. At times, the work intentionally peels away some of the superficial elements of poetry in order to amplify the acidity of abuse, exploitation and agony that women have and continue to endure in the poet’s hometown. Scenters-Zapico, though adept at commanding her language and art form, doesn’t forget where she comes from, equally concerned with her craft as she is with what is at stake: the histories of women silenced by male-dictated borders. These poems and their techniques are unfiltered and bitter and ruthless in their look at the lives of those who — due to cultural, socioeconomic, and political circumstances — are most vulnerable to being sliced open and ravaged at their cores.
[Published by Copper Canyon Press on May 14, 2019, 80 pages, $16 paperback]