Joy

by Angela Trudell Vasquez

My first memory is one of joy.

I am almost two. My younger sister is not born yet and I am with my parents. They are in the front seat and I am in the back in my baby seat, kicking my feet and singing along to my favorite song playing on the radio. My dad is back from the Navy and we are driving to my grandparent’s house. I can smell the flowering fruit trees through the open window and I am happy. This emotion was planted early in my body.

The body remembers.

Once, when I was a young woman, I forgot how to conjure joy in my body. I had to relearn. There were many things occurring at that time, and during that period I only wrote fiction–poetry being too hard, because it is rooted in truth, the good and the bad, the degrees of everything you feel, a translation of feeling but honesty for sure.

I did find my way back to joy. It took many longs walks in nature, sitting by running water, and a return to poetry and journaling. Waiting.

But really it was being in nature; the ability to again marvel at the blooming lilacs, the roses becoming, the trees with their gorgeous glossy leaves after a rain, the return and smell of spring, the robins, peonies, mulberries and wild strawberries. Sweet corn. The summer facilitated a return to my body.

Once in a dream, my mother said, “They don’t live with death everyday like we do.” This line became a poem. Being 2nd and 3rd generation Mexican-American growing up in Iowa, I learned to be strong to stand solid in knowing who I was and to not let other’s view of me color my own opinion of myself. I knew our history and the strength of my ancestors who came before me. 

Family names ring old cemeteries and our mother made sure we knew their stories, sharing each one when we cleaned up their gravestones while visiting. I have witnessed my people endure great loss, and rise with singing and cooking family meals, crying and laughing, and dancing even in the hardest times.

I believe if we have generational trauma, we also have generational joy. I think about what has collectively crossed our lives these past few years. It has changed me for the better, I am more present. Once again, my body remembers how to create joy through simple pleasures. I again remember what is important to me and who.

This physical sensation of the body returning to itself, the importance of being alive with purpose is something I remembered when the pandemic hit us all. There is risk in living, but I live by these lines from the poem, “The Summer Day,” by Mary Oliver, “Tell me, what it is you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

What has occurred to me over time is that inner joy and happiness is a state outside of what happens to us. We have a center and in that pillar we can be strong and whole, sturdy even . . .

We just navigated some hard years together and came out as survivors, our poems and poets tell the stories. What beauty will we create now? What have we learned?

Angela (Angie) Trudell Vasquez is the current city of Madison Poet Laureate (2020-2024) and the first Latina to hold the position. Angie received her MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2017. Recently, her poems have appeared in The Slow Down, Yellow Medicine Review, Poem-a-Day, About Place Journal and in several anthologies. In 2018 she was a finalist for the New Women’s Voices series and her collection, In Light, Always Light, was published by Finishing Line Press in May 2019. Finishing Line Press also published her fourth collection of poetry, My People Redux, in January 2022. In the summer of 2021 she became a Macondo Fellow -- Laureate Commission. (angietrudellvasquez.com & artnightbooks.com)