How can a catrina have those curves
¿Cómo? My mami asks me,
a 3am question nestled comfortably
on my shoulder in a Mexico City
airport, I turn. There: a gift shop
sentry housed in an hourglass,
a street corner skeleton
with full fleshy hips; a blooming bosom
I missed as I cursed the cold tile,
(because the best Volaris could offer
in Guadalajara was 8-hour escala).

Poets make it strange, I was once told.
The way children question the world.

Tu madre es una niña, my papi once told me
when I was a teenager while he
windshield-wiped away the lágrimas
she had created
with his callused thumbs,
hardened by the years of cutting
the tough skin of meat.

Tienes que entender, he said.
No one knew better than him:
He first met her when she was a niña,
a five-year-old girl he found covered
in piojos and pulgas in the plaza,
a girl he would find again 1,500 miles
away from their start.

He would lose her before he would gain
her for 44 years, lose her in the years
when she was shuffled back and
forth from Autlán to Miraplanes
to Tena to Guadalajara,
in the years when her tío
squeezed her budding chichis,
groping under her little dresses,
and her tías took her ropa
buena to punish her.

Me regañas como si fuera una niña, my mami
sometimes tells me. Yells ya pégame entonces
huffing it all into the air
after I have lost my patience
with her, after I have repeated
myself in English and en español
and still, she doesn’t listen.

Es una niña, es todo he told me.
A lesson he must have known
I would need to know,
palabras I would have to repeat
like a mantra with him gone,
with him freshly re-planted
into the Mexican soil.
Useful words but not enough
to fully grasp that paradox
of a woman who stood
on her feet all day for us.

Poets can stare at a foot, the toes
jutting out into the extraordinary.

I don’t know why, I tell her as a little
boy is dragged into the gift shop,
his fingers seductively tickling
the catrina’s ribcage as he enters.
Her tears dampen my shoulder,
my own choked back,
my cheek wishing the tile
spread before my eyes
was the marshmallow softness
of its color, after the week
spent curled up in the fetal position,
skin sinking into jet-black etchings
not yet beaten by el viento.

Krystal Anali Vazquez

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