PAMELA SANTIAGO

The New Thing

Devastation. It feels like life is ending. To be sad can no longer be virtuous. I don’t want to slip any longer, I’d rather it be hard work, hard emotion. I try out a New Thing. I give the thing to other humans and they love it. It brings me to tears, I’m so happy you love the new thing, I say. Im not sure what the New Thing is but they sure do appear to and bring it close to their cheek. It’s soft, it’s an absolute success, they say. we’re so proud, even though we’ve never met you. I can tell, I can tell that with this New Thing, my time has arrived. I wonder to myself why the feeling juts up then fades fast in a flash. I realize I haven’t left the building all day, the building in which I’ve been building the New Thing. The people, an elderly couple with shrunken gentle shoulders and white hair are still gushing about the New Thing but I’ve been squashed by the sunlight outside my window. Yes, the sunlight is squashing me and my heart runs from rest, beams of warm sunset ring and ring within me. The New Thing! The New Thing! The New Thing! I think, I say to my new friends, I’m so happy you love the New Thing. Mind not all there. Squashed by my Old Thing, that sun.

A Passenger

No such thing as failure, life is too rich, she realized. Achieving is moment to moment, the taste of living as she rode in a truck with four others back to the apartment. Traveling down the dirt road, she felt those fragments all around her, and then this hidden unity. A force. Dust that sat, then blew, then became you, as it rubbed itself into the golden hour. She thought back on the afternoon. Life is too rich, each face betrayed that. Life can be simple beauty. It is possible to make your life that. Suddenly she became very aware of the road ahead of her, it dipped and rose, a mountain ahead. She thought of the way the body can be. The way living can be simply being and how that alone can be joy, chickens running, a rooster singing, the wooden house with a pink door. It seemed there was no floor, no traps, only going and being. Doing your life at no speed, only the speed of the moment, of your breath, of sitting at the table on the edge of the small farm and seeing each other’s faces, each face your blood, each face your lines, each face your youth. She leaned her head against the window and imagined. It’s like you are a large circle canvas linen that sits against the dirt spun like a wheel with a light breeze. At times you flutter up. At times you switch into an enormous stoic rock, shaped like an egg, linen wrapping you up. At times you are the one slowly cleaning off the rock with a brush, and you only wipe the dust for a minute or two before you take your hand to your face to realize everything is as it should be. She sits, a passenger, and watches the life outside her, within her. House upon house passes her by. A man leans off his second story balcony shaving, white cream on his face, mirror in hand, and while the truck moves quickly past him, she can feel his long fluid movements, just for an instance, but she knows that instance is more like eternity. Yes, it’s eternity, she says to herself, because it is only a memory but it lives on within me, a green and white and yellow blur that was carried away with my movement as I passed. On that road ahead. Her heart swells on that moment of intimacy.

The way to get rid of a fallen tree

The way to get rid of a fallen tree is 
Taking an electric saw and tearing it away limb from limb. Cut off all the arms. It is actually very difficult and expensive to remove a tree. You wait for it to take care of itself as it's done all its long life but it just lies there. At first it hums, impact, a few leaves, but then it's hum gives way to thuds of silence. Dead trees mean less oxygen. It's harder to breathe now. The garbage doesn't help either. Everyone has unloaded their past onto the pavement, refrigerators, tables, a wrecked door but it never gets picked it up so no, the state says, you can't leave your past behind. LEAVE would love to leave. STAY it's difficult to stay. STATE this is no state. Haven't been to the beach in months and there's no way to relax. I visit the coast and it's covered by trash, just like every sidewalk in sight. I saw a giant pile of zinc on the side of the road, enough to cover up a whole town. Enough to build 6 new houses but no one would dare. A strip of zinc gently folds, like a flying ribbon swinging through the fading orange of an afternoon sky, onto one of the few remaining telephone poles by my house. There's a few left but many on the ground. At first seeing these things ran a thrill through me. Seeing it day after day felt like how much damage could be done? This damage that’s become permanent, everyday life.

What if I told you the only poems I have are the way that I felt when I suddenly saw a giant iguana drop from tree to debris ridden ground, like a belly flop in the midst of full swim? I am working to figure out what makes something so right. I gasped in rhythm with its sliver. We carved up the road to my uncle’s house on our way to get a generator. That generator hum is no hum. I think I’d rather have the hum of preparation for the night time, that full motion of light into total darkness.

Very quietly

Very quietly, I prepared for a long distance romance. I became quieter with my present lover, who happened by accident, a quick kiss on the cheek as the bus ran to a stop, and the blush drew out for months. Then the long distance lover wrote me a letter. Tiny words on three white pages and it all fit in a tiny Manila envelope. I was dead before it even began. I’d never seen such a pink and orange person in my life. But I flutter. Wearing into the present, checking out love letter collections from the library, breathing as if this could change it all, but I was not prepared to demand the mutual admiration I gave away for free and waiting at the bus stop, hands less an inch away from one another, I phase into realizing I want something that does not exist. It’s not butterflies, it is more like falling into a well and not fearing the bottom. What would I like to provide for myself? I cure myself with tears, I massage my feelings with dreams of abundance. I whisper to myself about water. Resting my back against the bus depot I close my eyes and remember what it feels like to float in the ocean. Silent blue peace that takes me nearer yet to myself, a deadened awareness. I float back to life when I hear the sound of the bus, my long distance lover next to me. My long distance lover is the well and I’ve just begun to fall into it. Walking home from the bus stop alone and I feel wet, emotional, I have a blue raincoat on and I hold words inside ready to write them in a letter. And it is only years later that I think to myself that the words were for me and that I want them back and that I will never get them, and that every time I reach back it is like reading a wet letter that’s stayed out in the rain that when I hold in the light only the feelings float right through like a sun shadow.

Pamela Santiago was born in San Antonio, Texas in the year 1990. In 1992, her cartographer father moved her to Santo Domingo, Republica Dominicana. Then Venezuela, Virginia...and so on. She is a graduate of the University of Washington. She currently resides back in San Antonio and is working on her first EP, La Revancha, which is coming out early next year.