When she was seven, my grandmother suffered from fever and swollen glands. The doctors believed her tonsils were inflamed, that she needed surgery. Instead, she went to a curandera. The curandera divined that a jealous relative had cast a curse on her and, now, her language of kindness was bound to her throat, the unspoken swelling her glands.

As a child my grandmother spoke to santitos with a voice like a chestnut: ruddy and warm, seeds dropping from her mouth. The santitos would take her words into themselves, her voice growing within them like grapevines.

During the tonsillitis, when the words no longer fell like seeds from her lips, the santito's vineyards of accent and voice grew vapid, dry as a parched mouth. They went to her tongue and asked why silence imprisoned the words of the child, why lumps were present under her chin, why tears drew channels down her cheeks.

I asked my grandmother how her tongue replied. After touching my cheek, she told me she had a dream that night: She was within her lungs and she rose like breath through the moist of her throat. She remembered her tonsils swinging before her like fleshy apples, then a hand taking them into a fist, harvesting their sound. She told me her throat opened in two spots like insect eyes and the names of her children came flying through her wounds like peacocks.

Patting my thigh, she said, "That is why the name of your mother is Maria, because she is a prayer, a song of praise to the Holy Mother."
She told me this, then showed me two scars on her throat—tiny scars, like two eyelids stitched closed.


st - 20 mar 14

part one is where i said "if we don't handcuff ourselves together i am going to lose it."

i said, "if somebody could just clean all that ***** out of you we would probably weigh about the same. if we looked in a mirror at the same time there would only be one reflection. if we lie at the same time we'll just be lying together, physically and mentally. and what could be better than together?"

part one and a half is where things get out of hand -

hands covered in finger-paint and hands that forgot to wash themselves in the aftermath of many a sticky situation. hands that held mine and hands that held yours, hands that couldn't be evidenced no matter how hard any arithmetic teacher tried and hands that wrote about every sketch artist but never any criminals.

part two and i'm hanging myself with an iPhone charger, hands wrapped around swan neck - bird girl messy hair tiny hands girl bushy eyebrows cross-eyed ocean eyes girl between life and death
- and solemnly stepping over that mysterious dining-room table on your front porch. my last words have something to do with Jackie Chan and i whisper
"nobody ever saw a cowboy on the psychiatrist's couch."

Part Three is exactly that: three. welcome to past present and future, i say. can i take your order and can you hold my hand and you do know that meat is bad for your heart, right?

____________________­

we sat shut-eyed and snickering and reaching our hands into a crumpled brown bag labelled "Fatal Flaws". "no tradesies" said the big man. you and i unknowing one another, laughed unknowingly. your slip of paper read "superiority complex" and mine said simply "inability to love" and i thought about how good our tragedies would look together, how our stars could align in all the melancholy we both believed in.


__________________

I was not
knee-deep in a bog
swinging a blunt cutlass.

I was not
naked and kneeling
before a jungle trellis.

I was not
youthful when young
(never felt summer).

I was not
alive when I lived,
being entombed

between antitheses.
I was not
happy, though this

was happenstance.
I was not
not awaiting a soundless fury

to consume my essence,
when that essence was what
I was not.

Buddha's and Christ's paths were equally right.
Imitating them obscures one's own path;
inward vision frees one from fear of death;
ego-consciousness curtails the light.

When people kneel before the Roman cross
as before something sacred, I'm at a loss:
they're revering an ancient torture device.
Still, they claim "it's about his sacrifice."

I've never seen any rose the same way;
a forgotten Dionysian frenzy changed
that love-symbol into something "deranged",
at least in moralistic terms today.