Mamifero Feral
My mother’s morning glories taste sweet as their petals break brittle between my teeth. The seeds itch in my throat as they rip down, so I chase the discomfort with a mushroom. The bite anesthetizes my insides and gently enters the bloodstream. Soft insectile buzzing emanates from the grass where I stand, and my body wilts beneath the sun. I kneel to pick the last heavenly blue.
The garden’s overgrowth scratches my bare legs as I wade through to the front door of her house. When I enter, the smell of copal incense and decaying mangoes intoxicates me further. The frosted bread of my childhood awaits me in the kitchen. I sway forward with the memory of maternal love and catch myself against her chair at the table’s head. Her cardigan rests on the top rail beneath my hands. I wrap myself in the knit and relish the fading residue of her presence.
The ceiling fan is still on. White bits of Mexican feather grass dust from my body like sparks in the gust, and the curtains cast a red shadow at my feet. Sweat envelopes me like amniotic fluid. I feel hot and trapped. I’m back in the womb, fetal and feelingless. I haven’t said hello to her; I haven’t said goodbye.
Photos of me line the hall leading to her undone bed. I remember childhood, motherhood, the experience of womanhood. The passage of my lifetime, the transfiguration of her princessa innocencia into who I am, here. Unsteadily, unlike my mother on the wall, I come to sleep in her wake.
Pink down swaddles me. As I lie, a mixture of blood and flora sinks into my brain. The petals in my stomach sit atop my bile like lilies, and soon their beauty replaces the regret. Recumbent on my side, I shut my eyes on earth. I stray downward to the next world and wait for my predecessors to greet their daughter.
I murmur in the father tongue, I don’t know where to go. I shout in the mother tongue, estás ahi? The bedsheets bunch up beneath me as I tremble; they dampen with my tears as I beg to be held a final time. Cloying and raw from isolation, I reach my arms all the way around my body. The delirium drags me down deeper within myself, but the misery doesn’t fade.
The underside of my eyelids turns a spectral gray as I squeeze them tight. A phantom palm smooths the furrows on my face and hushes my desperation. She leaves dewdrops on my cheeks. I reach into the air and speak, Mama, mi curandera, the wanting is ferocious.
She grips onto my shoulders and pulls me up. Rheum blurs my eyesight and sticks in my lashes like syrup. Her miraculous medal shines through the gluey smear. I touch the golden Virgin and look upward at my perennial mother. She splays my hair down my back like a trellis and weaves asters between the strands.
I’m an effigy of her heart, red as blood and pliant in her arms. She reaches into my soft spot, through my navel, to reclaim the plants which I devoured. The seedlings writhe from my umbilical and into her fisted hands. She kisses my forehead and whispers into my hair, I will find you in the Spring.
I lean on my knees, empty bellied and dizzy from the comedown. My stomach lurches, and the rest of me follows suit. The window unsticks from the sill as I force it open so that I can bend all the way out. The dandelion field, brilliant and fair, turns white as I wretch. I vomit on the grass, yellow on yellow on green. The aftertaste of Melipona honey stays on my tongue awhile after. I fixate on the distant lattice and wait for the dead to come alive for the despedida. I will say farewell.
