Author/Uploaded by Melissa Coss Aquino
Contents Cover Title Page Dedication Epigraph Contents Walking the Spiral The Mother of Wild Things According to Carmen 1: Arrivals and Departures 2: Burying the Dead 3: Home 4: The Magic Kingdom 5: Un verano en Nueva Yol 6: Weddings 7: Sacred 8: Safe The Daug...
Contents Cover Title Page Dedication Epigraph Contents Walking the Spiral The Mother of Wild Things According to Carmen 1: Arrivals and Departures 2: Burying the Dead 3: Home 4: The Magic Kingdom 5: Un verano en Nueva Yol 6: Weddings 7: Sacred 8: Safe The Daughters of the Wild Mother According to Grace 9: Castles in the Bronx 10: The House of New Rules 11: The House of Rain 12: The D.O.D. 13: No One on the Corner Has . . . 14: The Mother of Seeds 15: Todo tiene su final 16: Presente 17: Matador 18: No Such Thing as Safe Lost Mothers and Found Daughters According to Carmen 19: The Waning Moon 20: Walking in the Dark 21: The Birth of Artemis 22: A Return to Brooklyn 23: Under a Shared Full Moon Exiting the Spiral According to Carmen and Grace 24: Grace: Pay What You Owe 25: Carmen: Learning to Die Start Where You Are 26: Carmen: Learning to Live 27: Grace: Learning to Die 28: Carmen: Artemis Acknowledgments, Shout-Outs, and Piropos About the Author Copyright About the Publisher ii iii v vi vii 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 134 150 151 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 Dedication This book is dedicated to two Puerto Rican kids from the Bronx who tried to make a way from no way: my mother, Edelmira Alers, and my father, William Coss. May they rest in peace and power. Epigraph I want to love the story of my life, the stories. Then I shall seem not so much a creature in an index of adventures or of dreams, as an interactive force that fed itself on love, a force that did not atrophy. And if it was reckless, what will it matter? —Chase Twichell, “Worldliness” Walking the Spiral Carmen, Summer of 2014 The small cement room was not built for the woman wearing a long black skirt, with a lot of initials and titles after her name, who passed through the steel threshold of the doorframe radiating light like the full moon hanging low. She was coming through, like so many before her, to do a workshop for those of us getting ready to get out. There would be hoops to jump for sure, so we jumped. Out was something that kept us awake at night. It kept us dreaming. She walked in, set a big stack of books down on the table, and smiled at us. She wrote on the board: Walking the Spiral, then drew a big spiral underneath it. On the other side of the board, she wrote: Instinct Injured. We were a captive audience for a lot of bullshit. I was ready for her stuff to be more of the same. Her flow, for a second, reminded me of Grace. How she might have looked in her sixties. You could tell this woman wasn’t scared of us by how she went up and down the aisles between us with her handouts instead of standing in front of the room and passing them back. When she bumped my shoulder by accident, she turned her hips to fit through sideways. She placed her hand on my arm and winked as she said, “Sorry, mija. I take up a lot of space.” Her body language was singing loud and clear: I am free as fuck and would like to show you the way.