Laura Jaramillo’s Making Water—adorned with a sea-green background and light blue waves made of alternating ripples of Ms and Ws—showcases translations of time, water, and their theatrics in her collection of long yet fragmented poems centering on Durham and Orange counties’ Eno River and the poet’s earlier life in Queens.
Jaramillo—a critical theory scholar from Queens who lives in Durham, North Carolina and co-runs the performance series Paradiso—notes her family’s Bogotá origins and her own diasporic Colombian identity in a 2022 interview for Rob McLennan’s blog. Further capturing the Eno’s intrigue, she discusses its roots as a tributary of the Neuse River named for the Eno tribe, alongside her own activities tending to the Eno and its surroundings. Jaramillo dwells on the Eno River Rock Quarry and its state park, where people gather and share space to notice what’s theirs yet also not theirs. She embodies the necessity of the short-lived, either overhearing murmured conversation or diving into the speaker’s body-mind.
“Quarry,” “Autoimmunity,” and “Bad Magic” are immediate stand-out works—pushing me out into the speaker’s own experiential mapping that directs and guides the collection.
The opening poem “Quarry” describes people from all walks of life blowing in and meeting at “afternoon’s boredom / bodily anarchy” and “loop around the empire of mosquitoes.” Rainwater, like language, collects over time, creating a tempting pool of cold, clear water surrounded by Earth’s mineral accumulations, electric currents, abandoned equipment, and animal habitats. The thrill of the quarry causes many people to drown; the coldness brings them into states of shock. Jaramillo invokes warmth and fire through locals smoking spliffs in hidden pockets the quarry holds:
There’s a will to drown consumer electronics
that’s distinct from revolution. Local kids smoke spliffs and cliff jump
the quarry. To have perhaps re-encountered yourself in
anger, natural as infancy in water.
Rebellion can stabilize, yet “it doesn’t smell so somehow circulates quietly through generosity and impermanence.” Both the smoke and the “somehow” drift over, under, and among collectives of friends and strangers taking risks with their senses. The word “if” also emerges through the rhymes of “spliffs” and “cliff.” Following the breeze and smoke, Jaramillo highlights the immediacy and relieving stability involved in presence:
They described people they
desired as present or, so present. Edged by jagged rocks and slime, the
middle is sun traversing evening water. A pat description of beauty is that
which cannot last…
To say she’s present really means everyone
else is just not really there. The thereminic cry of girls before they
hit the water. Grind w/their granite lichens to sand. Light scatters
through the canopy as a disco ball throws light.
Here, memories crash, strobe, and settle again with their own tempos. Jaramillo’s poem aligns forests and bodies of water, vast and concrete, never-ending but sampled within grasps and gasps of awe, as the speaker reflects in the quarry, “Lost for a time in the abstract forest of your name.” Jaramillo becomes an observer to a group discussing their experimentation with drugs: “ringlets heavy with lake one narrates the spiritual properties of meth.” Jaramillo’s speaker condenses images of summer and of substance(s), creating space within a body bound sensorially:
I’ve never liked anything more than time… A tendency to float de-realized above the afternoon… bodies on the gravel… Dust that traverses the sun’s rays down to its depth.
I imagine that I am the dust’s depth as it rests on my surfaces, just as time settles throughout a day, a season, or a lifetime. Jaramillo reminds readers that we can float when we lay down on the ground, keeping time with vibrations rising from below without having to understand everything. Jaramillo then concludes with an epiphany/fact from the speaker’s experience: “Everything I know is fragments swimming off into the private world of women,” a labored settlement of concentrated understanding and the resulting comforts and releases from within it.
“Autoimmunity” explores lack(ing) on the axes of health and touch with “failure not visible on body’s surface yet.” Illness does not show itself, does not reach its peak or full potential, until time passes and until strangers, acquaintances, and loved ones show us who they are. Failure bleeds like water through typed or handwritten pages, smudging the ink. Touch (and the lack thereof) becomes a central focus; we see an inability to understand touch yet a need for it, a desire for it, as the speaker continues:
Simulated care sunk in the circulatory system. To listen like babies
Pink and swaddled, alone and far away. The velvet lather of voices
Automated against your aura… So many years I wanted anyone at all
To touch my face.
To go on without touch, actively searching and yearning, causes a restless exhaustion. Jaramillo writes, “The first prohibition is touch… The birds sing at night unbearable and real.” She describes “water traversing bones” where “a moment of internal silence impossible the heart is an audible presence then,” acknowledging internal constitutions and rhythms of touch that sustain, even just for the time being.
Nostalgia operates and moves within the poem “Bad Magic,” where “no longer quite young, you appear to yourself as a photograph and the bad magic of Images fails you.” Moving through relationships, schools, new cities, beloved objects, memory becomes imagination—its details fade and its outlines remain, shaping daydreams. When Jaramillo writes, “Yellow Schwinn Collegiate stolen. It’s coming / it’s going in waves,” I flash back to my own blue Huffy bike getting stolen, first as a prank and then for real, when I was at university. Events ebb and flow, the speaker becomes bilingual and then transcends languages, communicating in time signatures, in registers, in “days speaking one tongue, years another.” One can attempt to keep their footing or give in entirely to floating, but either way, as Jaramillo notes, “it makes you feel imaginary.”
“Gate Agent” develops and heightens an awareness of borders, their enforcement, their fluidity, their violence, and their tendency to limit people more than they protect them, as “a girl bleeds from the mouth at border control.” The airport, like other sites of arrival and departure, becomes “an envelope” where “notes to future selves write themselves,” leaning on the image of a dream realized or a dream potentially deferred. Referring to happiness as an illusion that the body learns to carry through society, and through those nearest, Jaramillo writes,
Mi cuerpo alegre camina
Porque de ti lleva la ilusión
Como el agua
Como el agua
Como el agua
Camarón de la Isla
I try to practice “a new way of sensing” with Jaramillo, as recommended in “Handedness,” attempting to witness new repetitions like waves, like performances. “Warmachine,” the speaker describes taking “thirty-seven pictures of myself in the back seat to make sure I still existed” —similar but different each time. Sound meets image in the concluding poem, “River Society,” where the river becomes a moving quilt of portraits that howl, that part ways when the wind blows:
And if we were images
It was only for a time and they’re ululating
On water and broken by the wind
Where again they scatter.
Each poem has cinematic scenes that I could access and arrange. Water can balance and remember as Jaramillo details one river / one body moving through a cherished city. Making Water translates time through its “cuts,” bends, falls, postures, rushes, and variations of serenity.