By heidi andrea restrepo rhodes
“I drift, leaving the chatter, leaving my body, drift, drift, up into the pomegranate tree. There, I meet a ghost, a crying girl, La Lloronita. She has also left her body. She has been forced from her home. Banned from the fruits she once knew. Dispossessed, I’d years later learn to call it.”
At eleven years old, at a sleepover, we tell stories of La Llorona and the Lady in White, the forlorn spirits whose grief drags them around the hills and along the rivers of our hometown. We wait up through the wee hours, peeking out from our sleeping bags to see if they will visit us where we left notes for them in the branches of the backyard pomegranate tree hanging over our heads. Conversations drift from Janet Jackson to playground dramas to crushes on boys. A game of Truth or Dare dwindles into a litany of timid voices choosing truth because nobody wants to get stuck in the pressure to stay alone in the dark bathroom saying Bloody Mary’s name, or to eat ketchup blended with apples and eggs, or to run naked around the cul-de-sac one time for every letter of her name. Truths and half-truths and outright lies of pre-teen survival convert into gossip. Somebody says so-and-so is a lesbian and kisses girls, and isn’t that so gross?
It sounds really nice, I think to myself. I cocoon into my sleeping bag. I drift, leaving the chatter, leaving my body, drift, drift, up into the pomegranate tree. There, I meet a ghost, a crying girl, La Lloronita. She has also left her body. She has been forced from her home. Banned from the fruits she once knew. Dispossessed, I’d years later learn to call it. There in the branches, we speak of separations. I read her my note to the forlorn spirits: a list of names, of lost grandmothers, never-more blossoming flowers, extinct species of fish. A keening of taxons, filamentous prayer. We peel the flesh of pomegranates, exchange the ruby gem seeds, taste the sweet juice and learn what it means, belonging: to be longing. If even for the briefest hour, we are tiny gestures of revolt, formless creatures knowing secret things, beholden to mystery. There nestled in the branches, we kiss. We are being-with and with and with. Each of us a portal to a world the other needs. She, a route of memory. I, a flesh of sadnesses through which laughter still enters the atmosphere. We are a weather of openings.
Later that week when I am forced by the nun to go to confession, I pretend I am singular, which is to say, human. I lie to the priest again about my sins, tell him there isn’t much to report, really. I do not believe in hell and its fiery passage to which the damned are consigned, but I do, for years, feel like a blasphemous disappointment to the divine. All my yearnings, wretched; my senses kindled; nothing a biblical recitation can contain. I refuse repentance. Every amatory devotion calls up a series of ghosts, dispossessions. I become accustomed to the embrace of trees. Fruit at its ripest tastes each time of defiance.
Now, when you bring me oranges from your mother’s garden, I hold you in my mouth. In the tree’s confection, at your affection, the world comes alive. To know such sweetness, its knowledges, is to ask, “why should our bodies end at the skin?”¹
¹ Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, (New York: Routledge, 1991), 178.
As a queer, brown child, I often faced the suffocations of a racist, homophobic, misogynistic world that fears the sensual, and found breath and possibility and connection through my ancestrally-inherited sense of otherworldliness and aliveness all around me. We are all, human and more-than-human, potential portals to each other’s survival and transformation.
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes (she/they) is a queer, sick/disabled, brown/Colombian, poet, scholar, educator, and cultural worker. She is author of The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019). Their chapbook, Ephemeral, was the 2022 winner of the Lorca Latinx Poetry Prize and will be published by EcoTheo Collective in 2023. She was raised, in part, by ghosts, and wants to swim with you in the raucous and joyful possibilities of crip poetics and abolition dreams.