Gerard Robledo’s poetry collection My Mother, the Butcher is a brave soliloquy of both past hurts and desire for resolution. Each precise word, each gripping line break leaps off the page, as in these lines when the speaker’s soul has grown weary from the years of his crushing upbringing:

the painful truth—
my mother’s bloody apron,
the butcher. She wears sections of my childhood
like outlined choice cuts.

Herein an identity shaped by childhood trauma is given permission to breathe, one corito at a time. 

In this poetry collection, the speaker weaves between past and present as he unveils the origins of his wounds:

like the flickering neon
of the seedy motel my mother and I stayed in
with one eye open, hiding from her merciless husband.

With each confession, he holds a door open to the past and scrutinizes his own humanity. The devotion to his daughter and the commitment to being present are focal points for the speaker to invite some resemblance of serenity into his life:

It’s what my grandmother taught me while decrying
my mother’s incapability. It’s what I’ll show my brothers
men do with an iron and starch.

Parenthood doesn’t come in one size fits all, but somehow one man overturns decades of emotional flogging by reclaiming his narrative through providing the necessary tenderness to his own daughter:

Now you kick off the blankets I secured
under your delicate elbows, curl yourself
inward—my tangled pill bug.

For a man who has labored through fields of hardship it’s no wonder that keeping order is a delicate balancing act:

She wants me to be everything:
a good father and mother, nurturing like taught,
and masculine like I never saw.

Yet, despite the challenges, there is still a promise to champion his daughter’s growth and happiness:

For her, I’ll pretend I’m a dumb rock of a man
while I caress bruises and bake dinner. 

Although the speaker arrives at no definitive resolution in these poems, it does seem that, gradually, he learns the ropes of navigating his own complex emotions, masculinity, and fatherhood. Despite the lingering external and internal tortures of the past, he faces the present moment, finding ritual in packing school lunches for his daughter and meditating on the fact that one day she will

outgrow me, my missteps,
and acknowledge I was always there,
though, with whiskey in hand. 

Ultimately, the poems in My Mother, the Butcher remind us that survival is not the end of the story—choosing to do the inner work is a radical act. Perhaps the estranged mother admitting, “I should have just been there,” is a much-anticipated truth, which arrives like the first glass of water imbibed the morning after a restless night. These songs of the self hold a brutal honesty and longing for compassion. They are echoes in the dark, wanting to take your hands and give them a good squeeze. 

A Radical Act