Ricardo Alberto Maldonado's "Layaway"

Thoughts on ordinary bravery.

Layaway

First, we would give in to disloyalty
with slack exchanges.

We were figuring what it might be like to live
knowing, intimately, conflicts with size.

Look, my life is not what I would like it to be.
This year, mornings imply an act of bravery.

Look, the window displays are changing.
We could prove what we have yet to dispraise.

All the males have mated and move on
in the city’s red gloss.

from The Life Assignment (Four Way Books, 2021)

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I really love Ricardo Alberto Maldonado’s poetry. There’s a real tenderness to his lyric voice that feels so gentle, almost merciful, even as it notices and becomes aware of the world it lives within. And especially, too, as it critiques that world. In an interview with Brooklyn Poets, Maldonado says the following about today’s poem:

“Layway,” one of the oldest poems in my collection, had me thinking through debt in my twenties and the persistent traffic of the city toward what, I didn’t know, not yet. Love? A life? Insolvency?

Love — life — insolvency. Such things, sadly, go together in this world. The very real idea of debt is introduced into our lives almost as soon as love is. Maybe as soon. Maybe earlier. There is almost always a distant promise, a distant payoff, somewhere in a future that never arrives. And there’s a real sadness that comes with one’s awareness of that fact. It colors any act of noticing. And what I love about Maldonado’s poetry is the way in which it includes the honesty of that sadness in the midst of his lyric voice. I think of one poem in Maldonado’s book The Life Assignment, “Status for the Rest of the Month,” and how he writes:

Tomorrow, jeans will slip on in 50-degree
weather and my repugnant heart will make me conspicuous
on the train, and later, at the bus station.

In three lines, Maldonado offers a whole spectrum of human emotion. First, the joy — I can feel it! — of jeans in sweater weather, and then the real sorrow of invisibility. The kind of invisibility that comes from feeling defeated, again and again, by a world that makes one’s heart feel repugnant — unworthy of love. I feel that invisibility often, my body made as small as it can be on the subway, wondering if others feel the way I feel — repugnant, yes, or trying, or full of not knowing, or sad — and knowing that the answer is probably yes, but not knowing how to cross whatever wide gulf seems to exist between myself and others. Maldonado’s tender act of witness is there in another poem, “Entry Level,” where he lets one line stand wholly on its own:

It seems days are stripped of kindness—

It’s a striking moment in a sparse poem, but one that, nonetheless, made me almost unable to finish the poem. I had to dwell there, held by the em-dash, nodding in the truth of it. In another interview, Maldonado says: “I hope one day my nephews will open my book and see something in their lives explained.” I feel that explanation too. I feel a great trust while reading Maldonado’s poems. And I think it has to do with what I mentioned above: there is a willingness to admit the all-ness of the world. And when a speaker of a poem longs for something like kindness and finds none, it makes me aware that the speaker knows, essentially, what something like kindness might look like. How it might feel. And if a speaker knows kindness, they might know mercy, and if they know mercy, they might know love. I want to be with a poem that desires such things, even if they cannot find them.

We don’t really use the term layaway anymore. Well, at least I don’t notice it. But what’s funny — not really funny at all, actually — is that we are often encouraged to engage in layaway-like acts. It’s part of the seeming promise of this empire. So much of life in America is the act of placing some early payment in the hope of later reward. The total amount of student loan debt in America is over 1.5 trillion dollars. But what goes unsaid is that so many of those debts involve their own early down payments, or the monthly payments just to pay off interest, or the payments of time and labor and energy — all to participate in something billed as better than it is. Really, all of those payments are simply entry tickets to another, truer American experience: the act of paying off your debts for the rest of your life, and the way such debts change your experience of life. Maybe we don’t use the term layaway that often anymore because you almost never end up getting what your down payments are supposed to promise. The future never comes. There is just the violence of the past, repeated into the present.

That’s one reason why I feel so drawn to Maldonado’s poem today. It admits the consequences of that aforementioned violence with such openness that it can’t be anything but tender. You see it in the heart of the poem:

We were figuring what it might be like to live
knowing, intimately, conflicts with size.

Look, my life is not what I would like it to be.
This year, mornings imply an act of bravery.

That first couplet is such an extraordinary example of poetic work. The first line — We were figuring what it might be like to live — stands so wholly on its own (and resonates as such) that it feels complete in and of itself. But then it is qualified, made richer with meaning. It is one difficult thing to try to figure out how to live. It is another difficult thing to figure out how to live while having intimate knowledge of conflicts that feel larger than the self. Both experiences are isolating and terrifying. And both experiences felt together within the wide, allowing confines of a complex self are also isolating, also terrifying. It’s hard to think of two better lines that get at a peculiar and particular feeling of American loneliness, one brought upon people by the demands of late capitalism and the violences of both capitalism and empire. To make a living, when one’s idea of living is also an attempt at loving, is so profoundly difficult, especially when you realize how absent love is within this world.

That first couplet makes profound the couplet that follows:

Look, my life is not what I would like it to be.
This year, mornings imply an act of bravery.

It’s hard to read these lines and not think of the past few years — of the struggle of waking into a world that seems so un-communal at its heart, a world that could be communal but is forever challenged and threatened by systems and structures that exploit the seams of that communality until everything is torn apart and left to live on its own. Mornings are an act of bravery. It is not cliché or idiomatic to say such a thing. It’s hard to wake into a world and fear for your stability or safety. It’s hard, even, to engage in something you love — as I do each day when I teach — and wonder about what your love is working in service of. If the end goal of empire is annihilation, does that mean that is the end goal of every labor worked toward while living in such empire?

That’s why I’m drawn to that statement my life is not what I would like it to be. I think some might read such a line and agree, maybe even nod, and say: “Yes, my life is not what I want it to be. I want more. More power. More agency.” But I see the speaker wondering toward something more rooted in feeling here, as well. I see them desiring a life that centers something kinder. Something not like insolvency. Not like debt. Not like falsehood or violence. What might it be like to have a life wholly based in kindness, in love, and in the work that centers such things? The work of repairing. The work of justice. The work of real care. I notice a refusal of the system that would make one think that there is a possible life that is good within this system. I notice a longing for something different.

In Zachary Schomburg’s Fjords, Vol. 2, he has a prose poem titled “Plants,” the middle of which reads:

Have you ever showered with your plant? Stand there with it in your arms, the light from the shower window pushing through the steam, in your hot wet bathroom in the middle of some afternoon?

I’m thinking of that kind of tenderness because of the way in which such tenderness is so often viewed as a glorified exception to life rather than as a possible model for how to build and live a life. Nearly all of my favorite moments of a day are moments of tenderness. When I water a plant in the morning, only to come home from work and find that it has lifted its leaves a little bit to say thank you. When I scratch my girlfriend’s back. When I keep the heat low, so I don’t burn the garlic. When I get off the 6 train in the Bronx and go to the little diner underneath the elevated tracks, and the person there immediately turns and makes my coffee the way I like it — cream, a little sugar — and places his whole hand on the lid to make sure it is secure as he hands it to me. The way he calls me buddy as I uncrumple my dollar bills. The way it makes me smile. Every moment that is not one of those moments, I long for those moments. I long for a world built out of them.

The act of noticing and choosing tenderness is an act of ordinary bravery, I think. The act of being alive is its own act of bravery, as well. But to find tenderness is its own kind of work. It involves sifting through so much. It involves attention, and care. It’s hard, I think, to know that care is a difficult thing these days. But it is. And therefore to engage in any kind of care is brave. The world threatens the existence of care every waking second. To care is to extend a different model for living just a little bit longer. To hold on.

It’s really hard to hold on to care. I’m finishing this essay while waiting for a plane on the first day of my mid-winter break from teaching. For not the first time in my life, I was given a whole body frisk and pat down after going through security. As has happened before, I grew sweaty and passive while every crevice was grazed and touched. I felt embarrassed, too, and sad for my embarrassment. I immediately felt myself become a child, and kept whispering sorry to myself, confused, too, at my apology. And I felt sad, especially, at the ordinary cruelty of it all. The way that the question asked of me felt bureaucratic, and the way that my consent — a soft yes — felt bureaucratic as well, like the eighth signature on a form no one reads. And then the intimate violence of it, in a sea of strangers. How often are we, in what we have come to call society, forced to witness — without giving consent — daily acts of cruelty? The answer is always. This brutal witness whittles down our desire to care, and maybe, even, our capacity to care at all.

And so I turn back to poetry. I think one work of poetry exists within the following line of today’s poem:

We could prove what we have yet to dispraise.

In other words: there are things here worth holding on to. But quick. We have to hold them before they are taken away, made into commodities, or made cruel, or made invisible. Maldonado’s work is a critical study of the world in lyric form. It reminds us of kindness and its absence. Of the harsh and real consequences of empire. What we choose to praise, and how, becomes important in such a world. It allows for solidarity and community. It prompts us to agree that our lives are not what we would like them to be, and then allows us the permission to imagine — or simply notice — a better way.