Quarantine Highway
by Millicent Borges Accardi
(FlowerSong Press, 2022) Reviewed by David E. Poston
In her endnotes to Quarantine Highway, Millicent Borges Accardi explains that it was “written during early and mid-pandemic months,” often from the 30 by 30 writing challenge organized by Juan Morales for CantoMundo fellows. During that dark time, Accardi writes that poetry “drew us close, reunited our spirits and held our souls safely within our own and each other’s isolation.” About three dozen of these poems are inspired by poems or lines from other poets, most from members of the CantoMundo community, including founders Carmen Tafolla, Deborah Paredez, Norma Cantu, and Celeste Guzmán Mendoza.
These poems are often-painful reminders of the pandemic’s toll on our mental and social health, one still manifested in isolation and disconnection. The opening poems are peppered with words such as terrifying, fearful, and weak-kneed, with images of desperately dancing the Vira de Roda. The poem “Bread” describes a world where the onslaught of “an unseen war criminal” meant that suddenly “life was forbidden and/everyone was an enemy.” Similar images of disorientation and anxiety are found in “We Still are not Breathing.”
There is a disorienting quality to Accardi’s syntax as well: halting, incoherent, vague, lacking in time cues, shifting abruptly, changing or omitting referents, oddly capitalized. In the fever dream of COVID isolation, the poem “We’ll Come Down Close Behind” begins
And such and we have
and we need and we want
and we have and if it happens,
we couldn’t leave, and there is not a
never in the universe except now.
In the lines that complete the poem, a variety of plaints blur into a rush of feelings that overburden the strictures of language:
And such and such and the homeless,
and prisons, and why can’t I
leave my home without a mask.
We’d come down close behind
In the middle of a crowd, as if we
mattered and as if things were
normal rather than a new normal,
which is odious. Then, then, and then
and could.
Then, beautifully, the outpouring of negative emotions turns to poems recalling memories and feelings that ring true to the experience of all of us, for good or ill, as if they were rising to haunt one in a dream. “For Truth would be from a Line,” for example, recreates a time when the world seemed controlled and ordered,
like a poem dealing with
trees I memorized, along with everyone
else in Mrs. Virtue’s first grade
at Luther Burbank,
where the teacher handed out
pastel marshmallows
when we behaved.
“The Right Measure of their Agony” describing days when:
We held spiders
And drank home-brewed absinthe as if we
Were characters in 1920s Hemingway. We agreed
to the word double-life as we ventured on the fire escape
and we were solid, unbreakable and under the age of 30,
with that unfinished feeling that troubled us,
like not knowing your lucky number.
The next poem, “And Admits,” recalls:
[ … ] rolling down the street
Listening to Beethoven
And drumming the side of the open
Window with our feet
Hanging outside
As we turned through the fields of
Almond groves stupidly
being
The lens of the pandemic allows both poet and reader to see what is most meaningful and dear about these experiences. “With Cascading, Iron Straight Hair” describes familiar teenage angst, with Accardi’s added perspective of being the other:
The smooth dexterity
looking forward to an open gate for a place I never went to,
a Friday dance gymnasium with a fancy backless dress
my parents cannot buy.
The charm of sweet conflict, snarled waves,
my Portuguese frizz waves, a divorce of emotions between what
I see in the locker and who I see far away
in the pages of Seventeen magazine, near
from the teenage experience of greatness, charity,
a catalog of friends I could never connect with.
Other poems go deeper into the complexities faced by children of immigrants, by Latinx persons, by all persons of color. One that I read and reread, even as others treated the same theme, was “Unlearning America’s Languages,” which ends:
Parents came to California to rise above while
blending inside a fairytale Knott’s Berry Farm where
Old McDonald feeds the chicken and a city where
kids ride bikes and play Pong. It was sleep
and rise and keep damn quiet about anything
different. Tell the counselor you will ride the bus
and stave off the earthquakes, embracing a future
that does not resemble any past you heard whispered
and fought about at night after bedtime
“All Unwavering Survivors,” one of several ekphrastic poems, exemplifies that trust in the value of one’s experience and the artistic cross-fertilization that energizes this collection. The title comes from a line in Gloria Amescua’s poem “Chanclas, Find Our Ground." Amescua won the Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge in March of 2017 with her response to Lisa Ortega’s collage entitled "La Familia." The line from which Accardi draws her title captures the image of the family in the piece: “All unwavering survivors, nameless faces, amid the turbulence of politics that can cut them apart like paper dolls.” Anyone who is at all acquainted with chanclas culture knows the formidable spirit it represents. As Accardi writes, this spirit is “unconditional and sudden,” this family is “remarkable for their stillness and fury” even if “they are outside / a long solo flight of music, / set apart, detained, locked up.”
The conversation that Amescua began with the Lisa Ortega piece is further expanded by the Accardi poem. Another expansion happens in the poem “Holy Waters Heal the Border Scar.” That poem’s title comes from Norma Cantu’s poem “Border Bullets” and like Cantu’s poem treats of the precious cargo that mothers bear on their hips across the Rio Grande in search of a better life.
Similarly, Accardi’s “The Poor Kid with Something to Prove” takes Diego Báez’s poem “American Marine” and extends the source poem into a vivid portrayal of what drives the title character. Borges describe him as “the serenity prayer come to life, the punk with no attitude,” as someone “tight, like a hand-rolled cigarette, someone “solely glorious-rare and in the pocket moment of be here now.” He represents all those “boys who are full of promise,” who are on “the true-larger, needlessly-bold pathway to forever.” Accardi presents this indomitable, indelibly described young man as an exemplar of the spirit that drives one to survive a pandemic, an oppressive system, the journey to find a better life in a strange land.
So where does Quarantine Highway lead us?
The isolation of quarantine leads the mind to dark places, as in poems such as “While I Count Like I Have Practiced.” That poem draws its title from Raina Leon’s poem about the smothering effects of pervasive racism, “Poetry Anxiety Disorder” and asks “How can we be strong and vibrant when we are not?” The ways we were told to cope with the pandemic—to tolerate rules, to stay in line—remind the speaker of all the lines and borders she has been told not to cross and of the lines she sees on her own face.
But these poems led me to the vibrant, beautiful, and multi-faceted CantoMundo community, founded in 2009 and inspired by the models of Cave Canem and Kundiman. In a 2017 interview for the NEA with Autasia Ramos, co-founder Deborah Paredez was emphatic about the CantoMundo commitment to fostering poetry communities—plural—recognizing the many communities of Latinx poets and the many connections with other poetic and artistic communities. I was welcomed into the currents and crosscurrents of the conversations between these poets and artists.
In one of the last poems, “One Season, my Father Leases Land to Grow Fresno Sweet Red Onions,” Accardi refers to the poem “Onions,” by Juan Luis Guzmán. That poem begins by describing hands carefully lifting onions from the soil, then connects that experience with the speaker’s memory of “pulling out my naked self” while swimming with a girl. Accardi’s poem begins:
Reading this, I cook Fresno peppers into Piri Sauce,
red melting the spice to the Portuguese catch-all phrase
for adding a teaspoon of red flavor into cooking.
The deception of hot, couched into sweetness
Mixed among red onions.
We see the vivid color and forget the trouble
we are going through endured in the sweet-hot flavor.
Quarantine, not so unbearable when there is beautiful.
In a time of unconscionable treatment of immigrant communities, these poems could not be more vital. Through empathy, through memory, through words, through communities, Millicent Borges Accardi shows us how the beautiful we share could bring us all through the seemingly unbearable.
David E. Poston's poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in North Carolina Literary Review, Pedestal, Cider Press Review, Bull, MoonShine Review, and other journals and anthologies. He is the author of three poetry collections, including Postmodern Bourgeois Poetaster Blues, which won the North Carolina Writers' Network's Randall Jarrell Chapbook Competition. A fourth poetry collection, Letting Go, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press.
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