Always Messing with them Boys
Jessica Helen Lopez           BACK      NEXT

don de dios

There’s a scorpion in the soup
a serpent in the house
a spider that sleeps between the sheets
There’s a barefoot bruja who despises shoes
and walks about in chanclas beneath a winter moon
in her heart there is a ballad that hums a tune
sings a song sinew
a sinverguenza curandera
shucking archetypes
shunning the discrete
mumbling prayers and deflecting curses
she cohorts at the crux of crosses
cleaning out the soul with a whisk broom
conjuring the early
morning
diaphanous
moon
the pregnant swoon of femininity
for the wont of wombs
and longing loins
she’s cooking up curanderismo in the kitchen
covering the mirrors with cloth
shaking hands with the mano peluda
making love to the lechuza
spirit hostess owl
yerba buena warms her guests
befriends
she offers them benediction
protects them with the oval of an egg
to ward away the ominous ojo
she hikes her skirt in the sand
and births her babies in the motherland

like her abuelita
and her abuelita
before that
when the Watermelon Mountain
was still Mejico
still Indigo
when indigenous tongues lapped the lands
before the Christians
before the Dukes

a baptismal by fire
that rebuked her religion
healed her with holy water
made her heavy with Jesus
so she took to the book
shook up the bible
molded her own Magdalena
gave the Guadalupe her rightful place
and claimed the crucifix in the name of Aztlan
the crucible of her convictions
the song of her land

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