A native of San Francisco, Pablo Tanguay spent his first two years of college at Columbia University, dropping out when simply living in New York City became more absorbing than taking college classes. Later Tanguay returned to California, becoming a union organizer for the AFL-CIO, a job that meant constant travel, most often to chicken processing plants in the rural South. Eventually settling in Nashville, he worked at a variety of jobs before returning to college in 2001 as a full-time English major at MTSU.
As a poet, Tanguay is at ease in adopting voices other than his own. “I think we’re all, at some level, fairly androgynous,” he says. “I mean, we’re all just people.” Tanguay lives in Nashville with his wife Sandy and his dog Jessie.
Diann Blakely, the judge of the poetry contest, writes that “ 'Holsters’ stands out above the rest of this year’s poems not because of what some might call its 'transgressive’ subject matter but because of its witty awareness of the darker truths and endless curiosity of the human heart. These are rendered—i.e., presented dramatically—rather than told to us in any obvious fashion; and the poem has enormous ambitiousness of scope, subtly perceptible through its stream-of-consciousness moves, ever turning back on themselves like the sea in the background, like thought itself.”
She’s alone, with tattooed holsters on her hips.
My sons pick the space behind her
to lay towels, cooler, lotion, books.
There is too much ocean,
too much foam, for me to see
anything but the hips, the holsters—
gunless, painted green and black
on brown skin.
I’m not a good mother, particularly.
I sometimes want to drown my children.
Abandon them at amusement parks.
Advise them to taste the stranger’s candy.
My friends laugh, vote me
mother-of-the-year. But still.
She swivels, looks over us toward
the sandy parking lot, toward Santa Barbara.
I try to arrange our things—
straighten towels, put stuff in order,
lotion the kids. But I can’t not stare.
Why did my sons pick this spot
to lay us down?
She swings back to face the ocean.
I relax a little, examine her
without hair in my eyes. I order
the kids to the water, give the instruction:
Don’t drown, your father will kill us.
She’s tall, standing on her toes, perfect
brown behind flexing those holsters,
brown back arched. She might lift and fly
away, use her hair as wings. But I
know she won’t. Not with that body,
with those holsters. She’s not flying
away, anywhere.
I check my children. The older, Nick,
rubs seaweed on his brother’s head.
I lift Memoirs of a Geisha, try to read.
She lowers herself onto her towel,
sliding slowly down into the lotus position.
Her holsters rest just above
the sand. I lay down my book.
I saw a woman once with strawberries
tattooed on her white thighs.
Once, under red neon in a nightclub
bathroom, I kissed the tattooed barbed wire
figure-eighting a pair of pink nipples.
Nick and Omar run back, wet and panting,
splitting off at the woman to arrive
from either side, marking an oval
sandprint around her. They dry off,
smack each other, eat. I shoo them back
to the water. Go ahead, I say,
Drown this time. They say Aw, Mom,
run their oval path down to the ocean,
their trail-lines becoming distinct,
encircling the woman.
I think of old Westerns, of corrals
and dust, of facing off against the law
and its men under high-noon suns.
Flee, sail high out into blue expanses,
or stand and fight. The woman’s
options, with her uncomplicated posture,
her straight long hair—with her holsters—
are not so limited, I know.
I want to ask about the holsters, about
their emptiness. What that could possibly
mean. Raise my voice and say,
Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice...
I won’t do this, of course. I won’t talk
to her as a friend, or as a woman,
or as people sharing the sand of a beach.
I will leave her in her circle and stare.
Maybe one night, when the boys are gone
with their father, I will see her in a dark bar,
her holsters hidden. I will sidle up
and whisper: I know what you have,
who you are, underneath. Would you like
a drink?
But this too will never happen. She will never
be in a dark bar. Those holsters will never
be covered. I will never
buy her a drink. She rises, lifting her
towel from the sand, and walks out of her circle,
stepping carefully over my children’s border.
