Layers

by Kelley McMinn

Start in the middle, with a photograph. A woman lying on her back in a wooden truck bed, eyes closed to the sun, hands crossed over her abdomen in the shape of a heart. Braids, like arrows, leave her face in opposite directions. The caption tells us she’s an actress.

A modern dancer finds the picture in a book of Juan Rulfo’s photographs. She adds motion. The turn of a heel, a wild arm thrust against her own weight. It’s all done on the floor. Her gravid body depicts the sun bearing down on the girl, her fatigue.

The piece demands music, so a flamenco guitarist is hired. Calloused fingertips on nylon, a blow and a caress to build rhythm from work and rest. It’s all done circling around while the dancer crawls and writhes, shamelessly. Oh, and he’s good looking, she insisted on it.

Her best friend offers to compose her a poem about layers of expression that she can read to her choreography group before they start their improv. This poet goes home where the stacks of notebooks line the walls like geologic sediment. Layers, he thinks, a testimony to his own artistic process evolving in journals. Rejection letters in folders separate the epochs. Nonconformities where time has elapsed, unrecorded. Lonely and idle, he finds himself at the center of all his best metaphors.

But there was something authentic there. A migrant farm before the bracero films, no cameras, but plenty of repetition. Digging, picking, pruning. A girl who rotated with the crops she followed lay down in the back of a truck driving to the next camp. Human body as cargo. Hot wooden planks against a cotton dress. A life buried in rows of grapes, a layer of bones in Delano.

Kelley McMinn is an instructional support specialist and writing tutor for Lane Community College in Eugene, OR. This is her first poem in print. E-mail: azucar37@hotmail.com