Bellas
by Patria Rivera

Ubi amor, ibi oculus.

- St. Thomas Aquinas

Before it became the Bethany Baptist Church

it had been a rice silo. Before that, a moviehouse.

And way, way before, when the trains passed through

Penaranda, in the years after the war when local business

was booming and they were building the hydro dam

to catch the water from the mountains, it was,

what Mother used to call a house of ill repute.

Those honky-tonk women who fleeced the farmers

and the dam workers of their hard-earned money

were ba-a-a-a-d, so bad my mother made the sign

of the cross every time she mentioned them. Those women,

Susmaryosep! My cousins and I would have been

cursed to hell like those men had my mother known

that at harvest time, after moonlit games of kick-the-can,

we crossed the street and crawled behind the santan bushes

to spy inside that big house and its many little rooms.

With a roll of cheap tickets, a farmer could dance

the whole night through, drink his sorrows away,

forget he had a wife and twelve kids. How we envied

those women their bright, flouncy dresses,

fake pearls, long, red nails. To dance and be paid for it—

to us, it beat being in the cowboy movies.

As my boy-cousins herded us through the dark

scented nooks, we groped among curtains,

awed by the narrow beds, shadows of linked bodies.

Neither angels nor beasts, we wondered what to call them.

Shapes of guilt and desire, was this what love is?


© Patria Rivera