MIGRANT ELEGY
by MARY ROBLES
Soy un opuntia de agua
(I’m a cactus blossom of water)
de mitad sal y mitad necrocorrido cuentista.
(part salt & part death-ballad storyteller.)
Mis padres eran un zapato y un esqueleto chupando un chiste.
(My parents were a shoe and a skeleton sucking on a joke.)
Yo pasar en casas dormiendos y casas de cajas rosas.
(I pass sleeping houses & houses of pink cardboard.)
Mi padre es un papel flotanto. Dos pesos mirar el rio.
(My father is floating paper. Two coins look at the river.)
Sé que él es / era vigilante y enredado
(I know he is / was vigilant and tangled)
pero mi nombre embarazada con su nombre
(but my name pregnant with his name)
trae el coyote a tomar leche en mi refugio.
(brings the coyote to drink milk in my tent.)
Con ojos falsos de canica, mi padre no puede a correr
(With fake marble eyes, my father can’t run)
y mi primita se escapa en la tristeza de la calva.
(and my little cousin escapes in the bald head’s sadness.)
Cuando yo quito los puntos, el agua de nuestra camino
(When I remove the stitches, the water of our road)
inundaciones con infantes del yucca, con las calaveras de perros rojos. Hijos
(floods with the yucca’s infants, with the skulls of red dogs. Boys)
apperecen en la luz verde de la noche, con la voz de una mujer
(appear in the green light of night, with the voice of a woman)
en un vaso de agua amarillo y feo. O es ella un pescado hermosillo?
(in an ugly, yellow glass of water. Or is she a beautiful fish?)
Soy un gruñido. Tengo un padre alacrán, y no puedes matarlo.
(I am a tangle; I have a father who is a scorpion, and you can’t kill him.)
IT RAINS NAILS, IT RAINS SUN
by MARY ROBLES
In her journal, Frida Kahlo wrote Yo soy la desintegración.
She used ser versus estar to signify forever.
I too have felt eternity’s grit in my teeth, the way sugar
clings to rain and saliva when we speak about pain.
My grandfather captured a witch one day in a jar
after I left his tools outside in the sun,
and the witch turned into a scorpion and ran away.
He used to call the neighbor woman la greñuda
for her outlandish hair and her disheveled appearance.
I always thought scorpions begged for prayers,
and never knew tangle in Spanish. In her journal,
Frida Kahlo painted a crooked angel with purple hair,
with wings, a dragonfruit’s gutful of pins. Here is the tongue
of the Mexican tangle; her gold stinger in my grandfather’s hand.
EMPTY HOUSE PASTORAL
by MARY ROBLES
The blue shell is someone’s boundary, a line their mother built. My wet hair drowned a wet bird in
my hand. Braid undone is brain undone. Yellow yolk of the egg pricked pink is where the baby
comes. My mother never taught me about that, but in Spring, when kindness is tested, I ask not for
protection but strength. Baby first, headlong and my amber eye broken: color of the wing
::
Great-grandmother’s oval face: shell built over clay. One robin’s blue beak blown open to allow
my birth.
::
Braid-braid-braid. You pulled out my tangles and punished the house in my skull until it got
fragrant. I had to learn somehow, and what color was my hair as a child? What is the color of milk
curdled into rope? You called my tangles snarls. Black language on a paper dish: Goodbye, stupid girl.
::
I had a baby and held her on my hip. We came from where dirt and vanilla grow. Someone told me
El Paso was a shithole. Someone told me I was abandoned. They wanted to hurt us yet the baby’s
expression flittered between love and joy, among the splinters. There is an ugly memory where I
lived with my mother in our clapboard home, and she and my brother wrote MOTHER on my legs,
my thighs, while I slept. I frowned, and an ocotillo bristled from my shoulders. Our house was a
bakery. I made conchas and kept quiet; the yellow, the pink, the door was a reticular blue. His eye
never came back again. My baby was a shy girl, she wouldn’t look at me in the mirror; but I knew
you were there, my father, like an echo in the orbital sockets of a bird.
When we stop hurting each other, we can leave the lights out and the windows open and fly toward
the pink light coming.
author pic here
Mary Robles is from El Paso, Texas. She served as Poetry Editor for Mid-American Review through Bowling Green State University’s MFA program. Her work has appeared in AGNI‘s “To Never Have Risked Our Lives: A Portfolio of Central American and Mexican Diaspora Writing,” Copper Nickel, and Huizache, among others. She is pursuing a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing at The University of Rhode Island where she is a Dean’s Fellow and Poetry Editor at The Ocean State Review.
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