Los Alamos
Manolo could be ascertained the purveyor of uncorrupted pastures strobing Tequila, but he is firstly who strained me. By the time I had grown into my nose, he had forgotten how to keep his posture ahead of police officers. This little carriage is here to return the mutts to the reservation. El reten is the evil eye; homegoing comes from walking while vaguely un-white. A string of sweat snakes past his ears and destroys the ships. While he folds that white flag, I will release the rights of his body and the tartish humish in biography (is it “auto” if I am no more a wight than he?). Papa was harvested in a fantasy where blue agave outnumbers the spirits; ichor strained from the baked-bulb begetter and poured into the rigid crystal. Every plant is sprung from the laundry-line, a marriage threading manhood by teenage mothers. From thorn hatches the spur, and on horse-back comes carvings of the performative surname into that resisting horse. Virility is an ear crushed by the hoof. Nonetheless, onward – plunder the ashen remains to find little claims for humanity. Strawberries spurred the generation that fossicked through glass and forged the materials necessary for seed-spilling anchors into those girls of the grass. Among the bushes, the moor is wrung from the same juice produced under poverties. This fucking is animalistic yet ritualistic: born with my ribcage accessible for pigs; pity me, not the man who armed me from colony shards. Hernan patricide. I peer from the backseat and find that my willed terrenos are some teeth and an identification card from the Mexican Consulate.
Heaven Expires at Midnight
Where I want to go is not atop any pastel cloud, debauched palace hammocked between the stars, nor behind a telescope watching them reassemble me from my old furniture. You know how the old woman clicked out before the last of November, before the hospice could tickle her door with antlers? Where she went is unlikely to be between robe-folds, or even within the flickering owl-clucks that announced her. I should go where the gray hour struck; find myself a purgatory pine bleeding into the polluted skies, the aging lights acting as a spine for the Nativity. Beyond a submerged Mary, the old woman ornaments her daughters’ boisterous laughter, and there I will be: a girl’s eyes, fixating on little paper destinies packaged by those who knew that here, this illusion doesn’t expire at midnight. I know heaven isn’t in the clouds: it was on the ground, where it would still snow for longer than a week in Chicago.
Esenia Banuelos
Esenia Banuelos is an emergent Mexican-American word-wreath from Chicago, Illinois. She is presently an undergraduate double-major in Educational Studies and Linguistics and Language, somewhere in Philadelphia. Her work is rooted in the semantic and syntactic revolution of Chicano identity.