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Gettysburg National Military Park

Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

Reviewed by Lisa Eve Cheby


Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites

By Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
Mouthfeel Press | 2023 | 98 pages

  
Xochitl Julisa-Bermejo’s second poetry collection, Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites, dissolves the separation of the personal and political to excavate and exorcise oppressive histories. Bermejo’s poetry does not seek to forgive or forget. It names and heals. Bermejo centers love as a means of accountability for justice and peace. The book moves through personal, communal, and historical places aware of how our bodies frame our experience of place, and invites us on a poetic road trip through the poet’s own transformation. 

Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites, by Xochitl-Julia BermejoThe destination for the this road trip, unknown at the outset, is an interior space where the poet grapples with the internalization of oppressive voices. Through complicated relationships with men and family, the poet learns to advocate for herself, to love herself with as much confidence and passion as she shows earlier in the book for her community and for those endangered by injustices around the world.

“I’m Not Your Torta,” a vulva-shaped poem, exemplifies Bermejo’s ability to merge poetic imagery with voice that is direct and bold: “You / don’t know how to eat a torta right, / meaning you don’t love it, meaning / you can’t appreciate its rolls or how / grease runs hot down your chin.” We see this again in the powerful “They Way Men Use Me,” calling out the misogynistic tropes women hear from men.  From laying “in bed, feeling / for an opening, something to savor” by the end of this section the poet tells “a man straight for the first time, ‘I need to be valued,’ and a hot pink tropical flower blooms.” 

Such images of nature and pleasure in community and family to symbolize her refusal to capitulate to erasure, death, and other forms of subjugation is a thread through Bermejo’s poetry. In the first section, Claudia Patricia Gòmez Gonzàlez, shot and killed by U.S Border Patrol agents, comforts her mother as she mourns Claudia: “Long grasses held me / I thanked earth for its kindness.”

At Gettysburg National Military Park, the primary location of section two, she creates rituals and communes with the dead in nature, to finally say, “I tell you, I’m done being afraid.” Throughout the book, nature and earth heal and ground us in a turbulent world.

In the final poem, the poet chooses “a single, bright Myer” that she “squeezed and spilled juice / over a bowl of tender frijoles… devoured two healthy helpings,” immersing herself in the pleasure of the senses and being alive. 

This victory of self-love requires the courage to occupy spaces where gatekeepers want to control who is allowed in and how bodies may exist in any and all spaces. Throughout the book, the stakes are high—often life or death. Back to the second section, in a place that erases experiences of non-white Americans as it memorializes the Civil War, where “a battle flag set in a field of white, / hate on display, taunts,” the poet negotiates being a Chicana from California and refuses to let others define her being, her beauty, and her right to be there. Just as the park is scattered with monuments “preserved in position,” Bermejo scatters poems liked “Comfort Food for White Spaces” throughout this section, like snacks one packs to endure a long, arduous journey.

And the poems ask questions that reveal realities many want to keep hidden. “What can you tell me about the Black soldiers?” she asks a white tour guide who later “directs me to admire southern state monuments as we pass.”

Elsewhere in Incantations, Bermejo questions celebrations of World War II through reenactments of battles and USO dances that she attends with a white friend. Later, when the poet suggests going to an Irish bar, the friend chastises: “You’ll ask more questions and get your ass kicked.” In seeking answers, Bermejo conjures protection through the family ghost from San Gabriel and memories of her father, “the one who taught her to name fears.” Bermejo not only names her fears, but welcomes them with love to unarm them, transform them into empowerment for justice.  

In the book’s first section, Bermejo reimagines protest and social justice poetry as love poems celebrating places of joy and play: her nephew with “hair smoothly gelled like a / gentleman” diving off the high dive to the “jazz and honey over a single-sweat slab of ice” celebrating Breonna Taylor’s birthday, to a girl who “picks petals / one by one” to see if she is loved. Though some poems are dedicated to friends or family members, Bermejo dedicates many of these poems to victims of violence of prejudiced law enforcement and policies. She memorializes the youth and children who died crossing the US./Mexico border in “Ursa Minor.” She calls out the injustice of Andrès Guardado’s murder as she honors the work of the men in her family who could have been Andrès (also her brother’s name), who “did many things we were told we were unable to do.”

Bermejo reminds us each joy, each life celebrated is fragile. She refuses to let us forget that Black and Brown bodies, even in their joy, are always under threat by oppressive colonialist systems—and individuals acting in service to those systems—that seek to erase these people, including women, children, immigrants, and anyone who does not conform to colonialist, patriarchal, racist narratives. More importantly, Bermejo depicts the richness of the lives behind the litany of the names in news reports, names too easily anonymized and dehumanized. Celebrating Brown spaces while also grieving the lives lost, Bermejo lays the roadmap for the journey of the book.

In a commencement speech, cognitive scientist and podcast host Maya Shankar talks about “imaginative courage,” which she defines as a mindset that asks questions and opens possibilities where we are told there is only hopelessness and despair. Bermejo’s Incantations: Love Poems for Battle Sites is one such act of imaginative courage. In this transformative collection, Bermejo interrogates our relationship to place and to history, reclaiming the space our bodies take as she redefines what is sacred while causing us to consider what history we tell—and retell.  

 

  

Lisa Eve ChebyLisa Eve Cheby, poet, librarian, and daughter of Hungarian immigrants, has poetry and essays published in various journals and anthologies. She was writer in Residence at SAFTA’s Firefly Farms and Dorland Mountain Arts. Her chapbooks are available from dancing girl press.

Header photo of Gettysburg National Military Park by Bob Pool, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Lisa Eve Cheby by Amy Elizabeth Bennett.