I

 

When Paz dies I forget how to speak my own language. My words are foreign
objects and I am synesthesia. I see it there, a painted little mound of flesh called
Spanish. Imagine my hands rifling in that coffin for parts of my childhood, for the
aching brown eyes of forebears, rrrrrolling my Rs in practice as if to raise the
dead.

 

I visit Mitla without a map so I accidentally find the place where death is. Someone says call her Muerte. The word pounces from my mouth. Cactus
boulders. Tongue swells in shame. I go to the Templo de Santo Domigo to
confess my silence.

 

Cosas perdidas siempre vuelven, the churchmen say but I don't understand
them, so I turn to the modesty of the land around me; it is all open hands. There
is nothing that pierces the sky as if to say I am alive forever. I want to make
peace with the phantoms of my archeology. If I go outside I might find words in
the threshold. Amor, love, anything.

 

It is the rainy season and I am bent over trying to extract words from dirt.
There is a thirsty jaguar in me praying, but Paz eats my verbs until I am

 

geometrically wounded.
I wait outside of myself for myself to return.
I want good words to reproduce like maggots in my teeth.

 

II

 

Paz is as tall as the tallest organ pipe. She slouches as she eats the earth, she
walks and eats herself into the black, and she is the thirst of beggars, and she
says don't you ever stop screaming until someone says they love you. The trick
is, you must say it first.

 

Rain is infrequent when she is near. Saguaro twists into the dusk, its mangled
fingers pointing toward the sky. You can hear the desert saying 33 Hail Marys,
you see red ants hurrying home, you don't have time to bring her organdy or find
red ruby beads. You stop and stare at your poison half, this Paz in you, with her
feathered head and her God girl stare. You cannot quiet your desert. She
paralyzes the good in you.

 

III

 

Call me Cuacualti, Paz says. And I — I call her what she wants to hear, tear
down the desert wall for her, put blood on hold, rummage through the teeth of
sand. She bares a face of roses, a whipped back black head of hair. She looks
like you today, and ever more every day. It is just you and this Nagual standing in
the yellow heat, so you summon yourself and she comes ripping forward —

 

— you want to use yourself for good

 

but too late: you have become her. You are a monster with no tongue and a mouth, just a taste for food and a hole for the howl. You are Paz every day you lose yourself.

 

Make a name for the dark parts of you.