Cover

Other Titles

ALSO BY SANDRA CISNEROS

FICTION

Martita, I Remember You / Martita, te recuerdo

Have You Seen Marie?

Caramelo

Woman Hollering Creek

The House on Mango Street

Hairs / Pelitos

Vintage Cisneros

Bravo, Bruno

Puro Amor

POETRY

Loose Woman

My Wicked Wicked Ways

Bad Boys

MEMOIR / ESSAYS

A House of My Own

Dedication

for Norma Alarcón, poetry ally

Mujer
sin
vergüenza

Tea Dance, Provincetown, 1982

At the boy bar, no

one

danced with me.

I danced with

every

one.

The entire

room.

Every song.

That’s what was so

great

about the boy bars

then.

The room vibrated.

Shook.

Convulsed.

In one

collective

zoological

frenzy.

Truthfully,

I was the

only woman

there.

Who cared?

At the Boatslip,

I was welcomed.

The girl bar

down the street?

Pfft!

Dull as Brillo.

But the tea dances shimmied,

miraculous as mercury.

Acrid stink of sweat and

chlorine tang of semen.

Slippery male energy.

Something akin to

watching horses fighting.

Something exciting.

My lover,

the final summer he was bi,

introduced me to the teas.

Often hovered out of sight,

distracted by poolside

beauties, while I danced

content/innocent

with the room of men.

He was a skittish kite, that one.

Kites swerve and swoop and whoop.

Only a matter of time, I knew.

Apropos, I called him

“my little piece of string.”

And that’s what kites

leave you with in the end.

There was an expiration date

to summer. Understood.

That season,

I was experimenting to be

the woman I wanted to be.

Taught myself to sun

topless at the gay beach,

where sunbathers

shouted “ranger,”

a relayed warning

announcing authority,

en route on horseback,

coming to inspect

if we were clothed.

Else fined. Fifty

dollars sans bottom.

One hundred, topless.

Fifty a tit, I joked.

It was easy to be half naked

at a gay beach. Men

didn’t bother to look.

I was in training to be

a woman without shame.

Not a shameless woman,

una sinvergüenza, but

una sin vergüenza

glorious in her skin.

Flesh akin to pride.

I shed that summer

not only bikini top but

guilt-driven Eve and

self-immolating Fatima.

Was practicing for

my Minoan days ahead.

Medusa hair and breasts

spectacular as Nike of Samothrace

welcoming the salty wind.

Yes, I was a lovely thing then.

I can say this with impunity.

At twenty-eight, she was a woman

unrelated to me. I could

tell stories. Have so many to tell

and none to tell them to

except the page.

My faithful confessor.

Lover and I feuded

one night when he

wouldn’t come home with me.

His secret—herpes.

Laughable in retrospect,

considering the Plague

was already decimating dances

across the globe.

But that was before

we knew it as the Plague.

We were all on the run in ’82.

Jumping to Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,”

the summer’s theme song.

Beat thumping in our blood.

Drinks sweeter than bodies

convulsing on the floor.

Creed

I believe I am God.

And you are too.