Tara Isabel Zambrano
Associate Editor James Ellenberger: It’s rather incredible how dense and interesting a relationship Zambrano explores in such a short space. Part of that, I think, lies in the author’s ability to plant details in way that feels simultaneously cyclical and progressive, much in a way that a villanelle’s repetitions build and build as the poem spirals down the page. Here, the spider bite, the looming threat of inclement weather (the hurricane), and the galaxy’s swirling expanse all, in some ways, represent the same kind of image: a central point (the puncture marks, the eye, a planet) from which the rest of the image coalesces into shape. These images, too,–and the inclusion of the girl’s missing foot–ask us to consider the absence surrounding the concreteness of our existence, the ways in which we ourselves flash and yearn “before giving up.”
“Spin”
by Tara Isabel Zambrano
I fuck the girl in a restroom after work. In the corridors, a geologist on TV expresses concern about the slowing speed of Earth’s rotation. We pull out plastic chairs, take sips from a Coke can. Walking back to our cars, I suggest my place.
At home I remove her foot. Carbon fiber. Precise. She suggests keeping the TV on while we make love.
“What might happen?” I ask.
“Tsunamis, hurricanes, all sorts of weather issues,” she answers, her voice guarded, as if it’s classified.
After she leaves, I marvel at how some things fit: the prosthetic with her body, her mouth and my tongue. My two fingers snug between her legs. Ins and outs.
How everything yields to a bigger force. Even Earth.
*
It’s one of those pale, wrung-out Dallas mornings. We share a cigarette outside our office. She notices a bump on my wrist.
“Spider bite.”
Her hand nudges my arm, her fingers like music on my skin.
Inside, on the TV screen, demonstrators are holding signs: Earth is tired of our weight. Let it rest.
That evening in her studio apartment, we fuck relentlessly.
*
An expert on the TV correlates slower rotation speeds to earthquakes, longer days and nights.
We feed on chicken wings, alcohol, and sex, wonder if our clocks are still true to their time.
I inspect the spider bite. It looks worse.
“You’ll turn into Spiderman and save us.” Her fingertips are curled around my ankle.
Whiskey blooms inside us.
*
Tonight she’s not exotic: It’s cigarettes and family. A list of losses.
She says one day when she returned from school, her mother was gone; her dad was in his rocking chair reading the New York Times as if nothing had happened. So much went unacknowledged that year: her teen sister’s pregnancy, the accident in which she lost her foot, mold on the bathroom walls.
“I always wanted to perform a basic two-foot spin on ice,” she says. Then she increases the volume of the TV, punctuating the hum of disappointment.
I watch the smoke swirl around a completely still ceiling fan, realize my feet are cold.
*
She claims we’ll drown in a hurricane; I bet it’ll be an earthquake. We’re afraid to say old age or illness: We’d rather be turned into stone. The sky is boring and blue. “It would be nice to travel somewhere,” she says. I feel hungry for more of her, feel the vulnerability of our future. All at once.
*
Inside her apartment, I dim the lights. I move inside her like waves slapping against a marina. The skin on her face is redder, her eyes wormholes of scintillating gases. “Faster,” she says and presses on the spider bite as if expecting a miracle. I pump hard, faster than a heartbeat, faster than a blink, our bodies like a top spinning in an unknown orbit, torching the air around us before slowing down, before giving up.
Tara Isabel Zambrano lives in Texas and is an electrical engineer by profession. Her work has has been published or is forthcoming in Tin House Online, Slice, Gargoyle, Yemassee, The Minnesota Review and others. She reads prose for The Common.
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