HISTORY

3.29.21
The doctor said you need brain surgery.

I can’t help but wonder if the aneurysms in your brain get a little bigger each time I can’t remember a word in Spanish.

They’ve sunk, you see. Somewhere into the problems of my life here. Buying houses, nursing cats and gardens, lovers and lovers and lovers.

Meanwhile you break the seal in your dry joints every morning to walk over seventy years of life three kilometers for breakfast, prep the kid for school, clean the house, teach the kid at school, teach yourself fifty years of disconnection from academia, teach the kid again, help him with his homework, comfort your daughter after a day on the streets while you fear her breath carries your last.



For over a year, you’ve worn face shields on top of masks. Holding hoping your lungs will walk the park without breaking your bloodlines apart. Meanwhile. I loose sleep over mulch.

I am so, so sorry.

HISTORY

11.3.20
Madre, calmete.

You carry tomorrow’s load with today’s strength. Trying so hard to merge two days into one. And who am I kidding, we all are. That’s why we’re here, right? Drinking whiskey so we can inch tomorrow a little closer from its timeline. It’s silly, the whimsy of todays whiskey doesn’t quench the thirst of the morning, the same way this anxiety doesn’t empty tomorrow of it’s sorrow.

It empties today of it’s strength.

So we hold each other here. In the goodness of what we know won’t change. Friendships, love affairs, the music that makes us dance even if time has put it on some time-out-shelf.

The way mothers just know how stories will play out for their daughters. It must be frustrating not being able to predict what our country will do to our family.

HISTORY

9.22.20
I’ve been named many things this lifetime. Manuela, Manu, Manny, Blue, Bloo, Blue Bear, Blue Bird.

I’ve been named Pretty, Sexy, Smart, Friend, Lover, Mistress, Foe. On my less proud days, I am Mean, Cruel, Cold. I’ve been named Petty, and Generous.
To my grandmother I’m the the product of messy linage and a corrupted present. True predator playing lamb, hiding teeth behind teeth by drowning trauma and wrongs.

To my mother I’m a scavenger’s daughter. I could never stop building nests full of “yes”. How could we? Scavengers survive by starving a corpse in its place.

Make a fraud of yourself long enough and the fault lines do what they want with your mirrors.

The day Justice dissented, the city became a heavy gasp.

That same day monsters were introduced without the courtesy of foreshadowing. At least that’s what they tell me.
In truth, these monsters had been dancing on the pages of our country, making bookmarks of our ignorance. Saying “look over here, over here!”.

They cut off sentences the way knifes cut ovaries.

I woke up that morning to stomachfuls of wrecking balls, dagger bellies, worn debris. One storm after another, scattering against our shingles and gathering gray hair in our hope spaces.

I bulldozed my rib-cage onto the bridge, collecting what remains I could, keeping myself unkilled in the monsters’s cartilage. Taunting traffic bellow to come a little closer, yes a little closer. I can play this game too.

Fate and Death’s eyes were on strings, swinging from a ceiling I couldn’t see. Wide as white flags, watching me.

It was Death who made the first move in killing the cannibal beast between my eyes. She looked like loneliness, wet food, and skin diseases.

She died before ever being born.

Justice took her place.

Forcing an eye to the future where I should have lost a lot of years. Probably lost a lot of years. Definitely gained another lifetime.

After the massacre, Fate handed me a mirror. My name engraved in every strangers eye.

This is who I am:
A knot in that monster’s stomach. I twist at its insides and mouth
“Look. Look at me. Look right at me because I am looking right at you.”
The monster snarls, but I twist a little harder. “Snarl all you want, and call me what you will, because you no longer scare me, beast.
And I’m going to eat you, from the inside out.”

HISTORY

2.18.20

They say only the the most righteous hold the keys to the after life during Rosh Hashana.
How fitting for you, who spent her life opening doors where M’s could meet W’s.
The Rider-Waite’s Justisia is blindfold-less. She know we advance according to our ability to understand the past, and that depends on seeing truth about life and ourselves.
This Justice knows. No.
Demands wisdom and it’s subsequent responsibility.
The knowledge that the vision of the underlying nature of things is meaningless if it does not produce and active response.

She knows the difference between doing things and action. Real action (as opposed to pointless movement), the one arising from self knowledge; That’s the spice in the meaning of life.

The Giant, the Powerful, the Notorious;
Queen of Justicia.
We will carry your legacy of Peace.
Rest in Power.

“All the “not readies,” all the “I need time,” are understandable, but only for a short while. The truth is that there is never a “completely ready,” there is never a really “right time.” As with any descent to the unconscious, there comes a time when one simply hopes for the best, pinches one’s nose, and jumps into the abyss. If this were not so, we would not have needed to create the words heroine, hero, or courage.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés

HISTORY

9.17.20
I read somewhere that weeping in-front of a mirror
Was less about inflaming self-pity
and more about wanting to feel witnessed in our despair

Sixty four bodies will never hug their families again
That’s the price they pay for going to work.

This jagged mirror cuts light the way prisms cut rainbows
the way ICE cuts body parts
how my nose cuts my eyes in
half and I see only the faces of
women who are less women staring back

HISTORY

9.9.20
THE WORLD IS FUCKING BURNING. WHY IS NO ONE SCREAMING. WHY AREN’T MORE PEOPLE CRYING.
THIS is the stay in bed type cry your eyes out style throw up your shame kind scream into a pillow grief. Fuck punctuation, fuck your grammar and the rest of your made up spread jelly on bruchetta, you’ve burned down every avocado tree North of Mexico, but I bet you’re a proud papi now that your blues and pinks taint the Western sky red. Just another red amber in ashtray of gas station smoke trauma – except this time you took a quarter country down with you.
fuck you people
fuck you emotionally flatlined parasites.
and i don’t just mean California and Colorado. I mean you too, you with your reusable grossery bags and compostable forks. Stop passively remediating with the shame of people who damn rivers and tame horses by using compostable toothbrushes. I want your tounge coated in pipe-line filth, I want words thicker than Pacific Ocean oil spills. I want your outrage, I want your grief, I want to know you give a shit.
Or has the fire dried out your tears too?

You leeches give me migranes.

HISTORY

9.3.20
Olle, white man;
Wave a wand and wash away the flavor of mortality in the Rio Magdalena, make it so only the live ones float.
Turn off all the lamps in my country. Keep the dead from haunting my people at night.
For the children, blow up bombs exploding bread, toys, and prosthetics.
From the encyclopedia of memory, cross out all the names of friends and family gone missing. Maybe then they’ll stop spitting straw paper at the back of my neck. Colombians are untimely like that.
Also from the encyclopedia of memory, cross out words more severe than missing.
Remake our jungle perfume – rework the formula entirely; more anaconda, more moss, more jaguar. Replace the stench of mass graves with river dolphin. Substitute gunpowder for dart-frog. War for Orchid.

HISTORY

Draft III
(Entry for the “SHORT SHORTS” writing contest.)

8.31.20

Sustainability Blues

We couldn’t possibly exclude Earth from this conversation–not now, not while she does her best to keep her rotund axis-chin raised through the universal runway. 
 
Can you imagine?  
 
Attempting to maintain your planetary dignity while doing the cosmic walk of shame, still flaunting your moon while the Milky Way cringes at your burns.  
 
“I tried to warn her,” the sun will say. 
 
“Those bastards did her dirty and now she’s really let herself go,” whispers Mars to Jupiter. 
 
Scorpio is visiting the house of Venus right now, so it’s understandable that her emotional orbit for sympathy is a bit distracted. Any other day, she’d gravitate over to bring Earth about the house of Pie. 
 
Pluto thinks everyone should fuck right off, but that’s Pluto for you. Always making something out of nothing, solids out of gas. He’s still holding on to grudges that died in the 90s.  
 
Zooming into a more…human experience–I know, I know, you are all dying to know what Mercury is thinking. Patience, dear reader! We will circle back around. For now, please turn the page to chapter Colorado, paragraph Telluride, line Rocky Mountains.  
 
These are the ridges of Earth that haven’t surrendered their grace. Nor would they ever, not to us. The Mountain Goats made a compelling enough argument, and have settled for part time equilibrium, but that’s a different story.

Mountains are nothing if not direct, flaunting their geological puckishness to anyone with sense, and sense you will! Those buttes? Yes you may touch, but don’t you dare ask them to bend over. You can’t sweet talk a mountain the way you can sweet talk strong people who fall victim to the kind. No, while Earth is essentially playful, she plays a bit rough at times. That much is inherently obvious when your hands are grasping for mortality at the cellulite of Earth’s great bluffs. She’s a great poker player, that one.

Earth is the touch of our senses.  Air can pride itself on olfactory supremacy; the prejudices of water and fire can steam out the rest. Earth takes the cake of sense and sensibility. Right now, however, Earth takes the cake, eats it, and washes it down with a pint of ice cream (originally procured to soothe the fire blisters). Earth, Majestic, Feminine, Baubo Earth has got a bad case of the broken-heart blues.

You may be tempted to dismiss her insistence on poise as melodramatic, at which point I’d like to remind you of Earth’s precarious position; there are only half as many opportunities for planetary purpose as there are fish in the sea (what’s left of the scaly beasts anyway). Just ask Saturn, whose monotonous romance with his rings has left him envious of the third planets’ most recent affair. He too fancies the capriciousness of carbon creatures and their wild-card indiscretions.

Ah! Of course, we wouldn’t dare exclude Saturn from this conversation–not now, not while he mourns make-believe altruism….
 

HISTORY

8.10.20
i’ve probably spared myself a lot of grieving
by not indulging in the darkness of boredom
things seem bigger in the dark
illness is thicker and more destructive
the presence of hopelessness closer

happiness is made of such a light and frail substance after all
no use in weighing it down more

dont mistake fragility and weightlessness for elusiveness
you don’t spend days counting breaths after all