CT SALAZAR

C.T. SALAZAR's AMERICAN CAVEWALL SONNETS, by JULIA MEDINA

Place / your ear right here     if you want to listen

ends the first poem in C.T. Salazar’s American Cavewall Sonnets. In his third and newest chapbook, Salazar explores the universal feeling of loneliness against the backdrop of the natural world. These seventeen hauntingly-beautiful poems wrestle with discordant themes — particularly of faith and godlessness, fathers and sons, and nature and capitalism. Yet, despite the discordant content, Salazar’s lyrical, imaginative style creates harmony amid the contradictions.

Salazar is a queer Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi, and these aspects of his identity are evident in this chapbook. These modern sonnets elegantly weave together verse and myth and subvert preconceived notions of the sonnet form, which traditionally was reserved for heterosexual love poems. Salazar writes:

  I already kissed all
the other lonely boys and they melted
like snow angels. Like a thin bone of light-
  ning, we hardly last.    Still we break open.

Indeed, the poet complicates readers’ ideas of the sonnet form. He does this both through the use of heavy enjambment and through the careful mixture of tension and undeniable tenderness, piecing the two together like the shattered mosaic he speaks of:

  I promise           I
  looked for you in the shattered mosaic
  made from the salvaged chips of empire.

And one of my favorite lines:

  Every belief grows teeth to chew you
  tenderly. If you ever feel swallowed,
take my hand.

The personification of “belief grow[ing] teeth" to chew and swallow us whole is impactful because readers, too, know this sensation: of feeling burdened by societal norms, suffocating religiosity, and whatever else gnaws at us and tries to bring us down. Salazar knows of the struggle and thus responds with tenderness, telling readers to "take his hand."

Salazar was raised by a Southern Baptist mother and Latino Catholic father, and religion and spirituality is a major theme in this collection. In an interview with Neon Pajamas, he acknowledged, "These intersecting ideas of reverence take up a lot of space in my mind and writing." In one poem, his mother ties a prayer to a sparrow's foot that reads,

  Yes
  we have sinned but we have several great
  excuses.

In another, Salazar writes,

  I said no, because you asked
  if prayer worked.

He prefers the tangible, countering,

  A hammer works.

There is a conflict between Salazar's personal faith and what he may have learned from the Church and his Mississippi community:

  Dear furnace of coal: how could
  you? Could you, if I begged, make me look less
  like the barbed wire was sharpened in my
  likeness?

Here, the poet subverts conventional notions of an invocation, choosing to address a "furnace of coal" rather than a "God." Later, he continues:

  The map to heaven I made on my palm
  smeared when I held your hand.

For Salazar, holding hands and the immediacy of that reverent act is more important than getting into Heaven.

Throughout the collection, the speaker is met with more losses than just "the map." Salazar writes:

  This is my box of twilight and inside
flickers everything           that disappeared when
we weren’t looking, like glaciers and God.

Indeed, these poems are full of loss — of life, of faith, and of resources. He writes:

                             soon the oil will
  run out we will burn   still America
  is just a word.

and:

  For God so loved the world, he sobbed angels
  and circus animals as it starved, and
  He named these misplaced creatures fathers.

and:

                      I never
  talked about what I saw in the river:
  the believers who drowned.

This mention of "the river" — so meaningful to Salazar's childhood — repeats ten times throughout the collection, often accompanied by a sense of melancholy. The amount of loss is torrential, and yet there is still so much beauty to help readers push through. The poet insists: “Say whatever you need / if it means the wheels of God don’t crush you / into flakes of starlight and arrowhead.”

In this collection, Salazar wrestles with timely — and timeless — questions about religion, love, what it means to be different, and what it means to be American. As the collection's title implies, the poet grapples in particular with his doubts about the U.S.:

  Hold your
motherland in your mouth, all marble and
doomed, a single lozenge of loss.

"What does it mean to be American?" he contemplates throughout. Salazar knows of the U.S.'s imperialist history, of the lasting oppression, of the perilous climate shift, and he condemns the active violence or complicity:

  Here’s a country of statues crushed under
  the weight of migrating ladybugs. If
  men could, they would melt other men down to
  gold. Mercy, you said, as if the fire
  blew itself out. As if the town’s missing
  children woke up in the silo unharmed.

American Cavewall Sonnets is complex in its thinking, oscillating between pain and tenderness. Yet, despite the poignancy, Salazar appears to be armed always with a sense of hope, assuring the reader that everything will be okay. He insists, "At the end of the world I’m told / a prayer could harden into a full / moon bright enough to guide our fathers back." And so we take his hand. ⋆

C.T. Salazar is a Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi. His debut full-length collection, Headless John The Baptist Hitchhiking is forthcoming in 2022 from Acre Books. He’s the author of three chapbooks, most recently American Cavewall Sonnets from Bull City Press (2021). He’s the 2020 recipient of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award in poetry. His poems have most recently appeared in The Rumpus, The Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and RHINO.

Julia Medina is an undergraduate student at the University of San Francisco, where she will graduate in May 2021 and will then pursue her MFA in creative writing. Currently, she is working on her thesis, a work of fiction that explores an unreliable narrator's obsessive paradox between love and lust.