by Luz Castaneda
Snyder Field (Where I Keep My Heart)
The hands on your neck in the parking lot of the little league ballpark. Scene. Seen. Everything clearly unfolding. The dust of your dragged feet suspended in the summer heat, the crack of your body against the jeep when he lands you there, pins you. No one steps in. Why walk around with hope in your body after that? And look, you have been saved from thinking America was full of good people in small towns.
The Styx flows through Tinkertown and I went floating for miles in a black tube
with all the other kids ready to run. We, in the woods, read futures on skin.
Consumed and consummated offerings. Something to warm us, something to cast off shadows. The campfire
was neither. Flames teased for ambiance and distraction.
Fed needles, knobbly twigs, leaves. Back then I kissed the mistletoe with tongue
so it would know: I am not messing around. I am not holding back.
No one held me when I slipped below the waters a second time, no one healed me.
Mine all the books for other ways to survive. No walking this one back. Steps count
on my wrist, my heart beats somewhere else. Go ahead, come at me. If you cut me,
do I not bleed? You prick. Oh, I do, I do, flow the red, scream the nerves, intact
and electric, overload the system and slam into the weeping hitch in my breath.
In my better tongue, the question where means literally which here?
I loop and lose track.
Everything after that first immortality echoes. You numb to the torment of the rhymes, the repetition, the cataracts etched into the world when people look away over and over and over. Pain flows to sea level; power is dammed. Your own heart beats on: in an egg, in a duck, in a paddling loop at the bottom of the well.
Shana Ross bought her first computer working the graveyard shift in a windchime factory, then spent a good while authoring a stable life before finally turning her attention to the page. Her work has appeared in Chautauqua Journal, Ruminate, Bowery Gothic, Kissing Dynamite, SWWIM and more. She is the recipient of a 2019 Parent-Writer Fellowship to Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and serves as an editor for Luna Station Quarterly. She holds both a BA and MBA from Yale and rarely tweets @shanakatzross.
Luz Castaneda was born in Brazil to Brazilian and Spanish parents. Since 2014, she has been living and working as an artist in NYC. She is a self-taught artist, a biologist, Ph.D. in Genetics, educator and researcher in the sacred language of nature. Her research and artwork are a combination of her artistic soul and scientific mind. Her art has been exhibited in multiple galleries in the United States and Brazil. www.luzcastaneda.com.