Second Skin

by Diana Anhalt

When Diana Anhalt was eight years old, her family moved from New York City to Mexico. The twenty poems collected in her chapbook, SECOND SKIN, speak of coming to terms with displacement and succumbing to Mexico’s magic. In time she would wear her second country like a second skin, reveling in its spontaneity, the warmth of its people, its natural beauty, the language. When she returned to the United States sixty years later, she was again faced with a culture that was alien to her. Her poems refer nostalgically to the challenge of shedding her second skin as she readapts to the country of her birth.

30 pages, Paperback

First published September 11, 2012

About the author

There's a song in Spanish: "No soy de aquí ni soy de allá..."--I'm not from here, I'm not from there..." I feel like that sometimes. Transplanted from New York to Mexico City when I was eight years old, I returned to my native country when I was 68. That was a little over two years ago and I'm still trying to adapt, to grow roots, and ironically, to feel at home in the country of my birth. But the one place where I have always felt at home is in the small space between my chair and my desk, in front of my computer. So nowadays I'm spending a lot of time there writing about the country I remember and the life I spent there.

I married young by todays standards--at 23-- although my mother-in-law told me I was lucky to have found her son. That I would have been 'quedada'--left behind. But she was right in my fortune in having found Mauricio. We had two kids, I worked part-time as a high school teacher, we traveled extensively, have had a wonder life together. For me, the publication of "Second Skin" is an exclamation point in a life that has been filled with exclamation points. I have been very fortunate.

Reviews

[FutureCycle Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are the publisher, so all our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:


WHY I WRITE IN ENGLISH

Spanish emerged through that same gap
my tongue explored after I lost
my front teeth and my uncle Aaron
drove us to the airport in my father’s blue Studebaker,
after we left New York, my grandmother,
the Thanksgiving Day parade, P.S. 106,
the smell of snow.

Spanish, I thought, is what happens
if you pour your milk down the drain,
break promises, or step on pavement cracks.
I was wary and “Messico” was a place
I wouldn’t, in my lisping toothlessness, pronounce.

Spanish curdled my tongue,
turned me wordy, oblique, insincere.
With its treacherous Rs, languorous vowels,
devious music, each sound colliding
with the next, it yielded one unwieldy run-on word,
too big for my child-sized mouth.

Today I speak Spanish to survive,
but I write in English for its punch,
for the way it slices through excess, draws blood,
attracts sharks. (They know this voice and come to me.)


TO MY MOVER

You claimed you could crate and ship anything:
forty-one paintings, the piano, dining room table,
a headboard (king-sized), Persian carpets,
an African family tree carved from ebony.

So, what happened to the rest? My cargo
of Mexican clouds, for example, the view out
my window of wind flapping flags, sun riding
behind the volcanoes—they’re not on this invoice.

You’ve forgotten the bougainvillea, the cures for ague
and heartbreak sold in markets with the chilies
and carrots. What about the church bells, the mariachis?
Where are the taxicab rosaries, Guadalupe virgins,

bald infants in headbands and Saturday dresses,
wet-season rainbows, tortilla dough, mangos,
the colors—fuchsia, scarlet, raucous chartreuse?
Damn it! Why don’t you listen? I’m just getting started.
What the hell have you done with my friends?

[Carla Hagen · Rating 5 out of 5]

To read the poems of Second Skin is to plunge into a riot of bougainvillea, tortillas fresh off the comal, clanging church bells, alleys called Little Street of Bitterness. The slim, elegant book vividly evokes Mexico on a beautifully rendered landscape of nostalgia. Diana Anhalt, who moved to the country in 1950 with her McCarthy-fleeing parents and recently returned to the United States, could not resist Mexico’s seductive pull: its midnight serenatas, the street vendors singing of their wares, the markets overflowing with calla lilies, roses, carnations. Nor could she escape the smog of Mexico City, the legions of dead who always managed to cast their vote in election years, the severed heads of drug cartel victims. But Second Skin is neither a sentimental souvenir nor a political analysis. It is a poignant, unflinching look back at the beloved country, imprinted on Anhalt’s very skin—then left behind:

To live without fuschia, January’s sun, Spanish,
smoke-spewing Popocatepetl, the night watchman’s
warning whistle, driving both ways on a one-way street
is impossible….


Anhalt’s strong craft combined with her insider/outsider relationship to her adopted country allow her to bring us fresh lines, as in her “Ode to Spanish:”

So vowel happy, so full of yourself, so giddy on rhyme…

And to digress on the nature of belonging and change:

Roots are hardy travelers, adaptable, they float
on water, cohere to wood…

Second Skin is for those who know Mexico and those who want to learn its essence. It is for fans of lyrical, muscular poetry. And finally, this important book is for anyone who has ever fallen in love with a place.