“In this poem, the instrument is destroyed, but I know the people who played it, and they’re still able to sing,” shared M. Colón-Margolies, our finalist for “A House Divided.” Read her winning piece, and then enjoy this interview with the writer about her poem “Terms of Sale.”
Rebecca Paredes: You submitted this poem in response to our “A House Divided” call for submissions, which asked writers to explore the shape of shelter and what “home” means today. How did you approach crafting this piece in response to the theme?
M. Colón-Margolies: I had a story in my head. A relative of mine had to destroy a piano when they moved out of their house and into a smaller, mobility-accessible apartment, and the brutal nature of that event, of taking a sledgehammer to a 100-year-old piano, stuck with me. I mostly write fiction but was having trouble with it at the time. The tidy arrangement of characters and the artificiality of climax and denouement felt off, given the subject matter. In the end, the writing I did came out fragmented, as verse.
I was also thinking at the time of the Julio Cortazar story, “Casa Tomada” or “House Taken Over.” It’s a short story about a hostile occupation of a home. Slowly, a house is taken, room by room, by a mysterious force. Each new “taking” seals a part of the house and imbues the reader with a feeling of dread. The story hints that there is an essential corruption that brings about this takeover. That there has always been some evil in the home that now grows wild. The poem I wrote is gentler, but perhaps there was something in my mind about the desperate circumstances many people are facing right now, the feeling many have of being pulled under, bit by bit—and also the knowledge that the forces squeezing us have always existed.
RP: “Terms of Sale” has so many layers—it begins with the realities of aging, and then shifts into an exploration of the ways that packing up a home is not a neutral process in our current political climate. This stanza is such an impactful turn, tonally: “Only later, a few days before the sale, / the day the government changes / the buyers also change their minds. / Tell her parents to get rid of it.” Everything was moving along, and then the parents were left scrambling. Can you talk to me about your thought process at this moment in the poem?
MCM: The events described in the poem happened this past winter, after the new administration took power. The situation was no one’s fault—my relatives couldn’t manage their house physically anymore and had no room for the piano in their new place. The buyers ended up not wanting the piano, which is understandable and their right. But no one else wanted the piano either, and that image of the violence of physically destroying a cherished musical instrument that brought togetherness and joy was something I couldn’t shake, especially because I was also thinking at the time about everything that was happening in the country—from masked immigration officers snatching people off the street to arts programs being slashed and dismantled.
RP: The final three lines of this poem stuck with me—they’re simultaneously tragic and resolved. Did you discover this ending in the process of crafting the poem, or was this where it was always headed?
MCM: The ending came to me as I wrote.
The friend who helped my relative destroy the piano lived through a military dictatorship in his home country. Maybe this had nothing to do with his ability to do the difficult thing, but it felt pertinent to me. The last lines of the poem belong to him and have to do with remembering, which seems to me to be more important than ever when so much is being ripped away.
The notion of home often has more to do with emotions and memory than with something physically tangible. As I wrote the poem, I thought that music is that way, too. A few years ago, an uncle I loved very much had a stroke. He couldn’t walk or speak, but somehow, he could sing. And not just sing, but sing songs in Spanish, which wasn’t his first language. He learned folk songs while working for the Peace Corps in the 1960s in Chile. I guess the songs he learned there embedded in some deeper folds of his mind so that when motricity and language broke down, music remained. In this poem, the instrument is destroyed, but I know the people who played it, and they’re still able to sing.
RP: Is there anything else you’d like to share about this poem or what you’re working on now?
MCM: I’m writing a novel about a young woman who disappears in the Atacama Desert in Chile. She is researching lithium mining there, lithium that will be used to power electric cars and cell phone batteries, but that is draining the fragile ecosystem of water. I have been to this desert several times, and when I was there this past year, someone told me that the solar radiation is similar to that on Venus. It’s a very beautiful and sometimes alien place, the driest desert in the world. It’s also the site of contemporary debates about how to mitigate climate change, water scarcity and the race to mine rare minerals, among others.
Anyway, the novel came to me through the prism of this setting, and is inspired, in part, by Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. I love the hallucinatory quality of that novel, and that it is also somehow written in clean, clear prose. It’s a novel about ethical conflicts but also about love, which my book is about, too. That, and betrayals for a supposedly greater good.
