Little Houses by Athena Nassar

Athena Nassar’s debut collection Little Houses launched the month and it is a delight. The speaker’s voice and use of imagery is strong. The speaker is a child of immigrants living in the South of the US (suburban Atlanta, specifically) and the poems show a world where everything is not smooth and nice. The speaker, as many children of immigrants do, stands apart from the surrounding society but still has a view and can act as a knowledgable critic and mirror to that society. The speed of the language is often relentless. It’s a wonderful book. Buy here.

From “ghost girls”

It does not matter where we are going

when we look like this

Floating like pollen over Boston sidewalks We like when they stare

Our perfume carrying

with the breeze

We glide past streetlights

hollow homes hollow

boys Their vital organs gouged out with a spoon and folded neatly

in a plastic bag

I pass through them because I am a breeze

bottled in a plastic shape

In knee high boots I pass . . .

From “Not Because They Love Me”

The more I love a thing, the more I want to invade it.

As a child, I would take my mother’s hair, slick as the black

eggs of a beluga fish, pressing it to my cheek, twisting

it until it broke from her scalp. To bless myself, I drink

from the well until the stones hold no water, and my belly

is a cold lake. The horseflies feed on my legs not

because they love me, but because I am a body of blood . . .

From “Cockpit”

Sometimes, I think I could suffocate in this openness.

My mother slept in Puente De Jobos with nothing

but mosquito netting to protect her from the heat

and the dogs and the dogs in heat. The mosquitos,

fat with my mother’s blood, still flew in and out

of the holes in the netting. Even with those thick socks

pulled up to her knees, she couldn’t stop the world

from picking at the flesh left exposed . . .