Carmen and Grace


 
 
 
 
 
 
 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
 
 
 
 
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 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.