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Joe Jiminez

Guest Posts, poetry, Race/Racism

Thole–. (a lyric on my American guilt)

November 21, 2015

By Joe Jiminez

 

I watched a video:  men’d hurled bodies onto a freeway.

In front of my television I paused, unthinkingly—

Bodies.  Asphalt.  Sky—.

México.  This is where my mother is from—.

With my eyes, I listened.  For something often comes when we shut down frenzy and instinct and let the body be a body—.

A body is a form, a physique, anatomy, skeleton, a soma.

A body is a torso and hair, main parts, heart and nerves, tendons and toes.

At my computer screen, I paused.  I was watching it again—the bodies in México thrown onto pavement.  The frame, and I gawked at the bodies’ dismal shapes, a geometry all at once unfamiliar and wonted because pixels.

Killed men strewn across a dark road…  Eons ago, the land also suffered so many insufferable deaths.

A living room shrine dedicated to a woman named Rosa Diana Suárez:  white party dress, photographs, wall-painted ivy, a tiger in a tree.  Offerings of chicken and chewing gum, and her father made this in memory of her—.

“impunity is the main motive of the gender[ed] crime…”

Don’t you remember?

Land and specie and dominance—how is this not the same?

Thole—.  That is the syllable for it.

How it means to tolerate, so distinct from allowances.  Or the slim permissions we make to seek some horror and not ourselves be eaten with it.  “to endure something without complaint or resistance;  to be afflicted and to suffer—.”

We thole.  You thole.  I thole.

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