Sandra Cisneros is rocking my world

Preface from
My Wicked Wicked Ways, Sandra Cisneros

Gentleman, ladies. If you please—these
are my wicked poems from when.
The girl grief decade. My wicked nun
years, so to speak. I sinned.

Not in the white-woman way.
Not as Simone voyeuring the pretty
slum city on the golden arm. And no,

not wicked like captain of the bad
boy blood, the Hollywood hood–
lum who boozed and floozed it up,
hell-bent on self destruction. Not me.
Well. Not much. Tell me,
how does a woman who.
A woman like me. Daughter of
a daddy with a hammer and blistered feet
he'd dip into a washtub while he ate his dinner.
A woman with no birthright in the matter.

What does a woman inherit
that tells her how
to go?

My first felony—I took up with poetry.
For this penalty, the rice burned.
Mother warned I'd never wife.

Wife? A woman like me
whose choice was rolling pin or factory.
And absurd vice, this wicked wanton
writer's life.

I chucked the life
my father'd plucked for me.
Leapt into the salamander fire.
A girl who'd never roamed
beyond her father's rooster eye.
Winched the door with poetry and fled.
For good. And grieved I'd gone
when I was so alone.

In my kitchen, in the thin hour,
a calendar Cassatt chanted
Repeat after me—
I can live alone and I love to...
What a crock. Each week, the ritual grief.
That decade of knuckled knocks.

I took the crooked route and liked my badness.
Played at mistress.
Tattooed an ass.
Lapped up my happiness from a glass.
It was something, at least.

I hadn't a clue.

What does a woman
willing to invent herself
at twenty-two or twenty-nine
do? A woman with no who nor how.
And how was I to know what was unwise.

I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be happy.
What's that? At twenty. Or twenty-nine.
Love. Baby. Husband.
The works. The big palookas of life.
Wanting and not wanting.
Take your hands off me.

I left my father's house
before my brothers,
vagabonded the globe
like a rich white girl.
Got a flat.
I paid for it. I kept it clean.
Sometimes the silence frightened me.
Sometimes the silence blessed me.

It would come get me.
Late at night.
Open like a window,
hungry for my life.

I wrote when I was sad.
The flat cold.
When there was no love—
new, old—
to distract me.
No six brothers
with their Fellini racket.
No mother, father,
with their wise I told you.

I tell you,
these are the pearls
from that ten-year itch,
my jewels, my colicky kids
who fussed and kept
me up the wicked nights
when all i wanted was...
With nothing in the texts to tell me.

But that was then,
the who-I-was who would become the who-I-am.
These poems are from that hobbled when.

sandra cisneros, 11ofjune,1992, hydra greece