The Birth of the First Sun

The world began the way all worlds begin — with failure. My great grandmother was the first to unfold herself from the sky. She hinged her clothespin limbs and went to work, scrubbing the void with Fabuloso. Braiding time into her hair. In an attempt to save herself from His insatiable hunger, she built her belly into a factory. Every morning she would assemble Him a daughter, and He would take the little girl into His mouth like a prayer and slither away, not to be seen again until dusk. See, the problem with living things is they want to stay alive. Gabriela would sicken with guilt, her heart a cast iron comal, cooling under the sting of His icy condescension. I’m their father, I wouldn’t hurt them, He would scold. He wouldn’t hurt them, Gabriela repeated. The words filled her for years, every time she doubted they rose again inside of her like a helium balloon. At the end of each day she busied herself — with laundry, the frijoles, the feral cats who persist despite her fear  — anything so she didn’t have to watch her daughters sneak back into their rooms, how their bones would rattle round empty like the beer barrels stacked behind the kitchen. Tía Julissa was one of the lucky ones. She only lost a leg, so when it was her time to rise, she stumbled like an uncalibrated clock. That was the first sun.

Cielito Lindo

“The situation will be under control very shortly.”

— Luis Echeverría, 1968

The day my grandfather disappeared, he rose one last time on La Plaza de Tres Culturas. Rodrigo had been the sun for nearly 600 years. It was a good job. The farmers, always grateful, left him baskets of tomatoes in the summer and rábanos in the winter. The trip each day was long, and sometimes his feet would crack and bleed, the solar flares painting the sky. Still, there was worse work. At least now no one could look straight at him, their accusing glares watered under the luminosity of his gaze. Not that it stopped the rumors. They stretched as long as the 45 rivers caged beneath Mexico City. Whispers of the sun, his socialism. How he gives light to everyone. For the last forty years, El Partido Revolucionario Institucional had been knocking on his door in the clouds, threatening eclipses & permanent rainstorms. Rodrigo would just smile, serving them coffee & pasteles. He had a job to do, a family to provide for. Couldn’t they, as men, understand that? But being made in God’s image means we all have choices. Theirs: to flood the sky in rapture. From the Church of Santiago Tlatelolco, men in white gloves razed a field of children as easy as wheat. On a clear night in October, soldiers came like a storm into the heart of my grandfather’s living house. As they jailed the sun, his blood jeweled in constellations, carrying with it the echoes of a song, the promise of deliverance for his daughter, his little sky.

Solar Weather & Lucky Strikes

When my Uncle Adán became the sun, my mother moved to the outermost edge of her orbit. He chased her and she spun, the years getting shorter, falling between them like dominoes. She swears it’s Chicago’s fault. A city on life support, with a lake that looks like an ocean and a river that runs backwards  —  nothing is as it should. Like the letters from Veracruz filled with cielito and soon, how they’re not thick enough to sleep on.  The way my mother tells it, she became Catholic because churches are warm. She would sleep sitting straight up, like the Sears Tower, the crown of her head slicing the sky. For years, my mother didn’t have a coat because she gave it to her brother. At night, she would tell him stories about how God made Mexicans out of corn. Como tamales, she would giggle, wrapping him up like a husk. But that's the problem with brothers — they outgrow the coats you give them. As soon as he could, my uncle chose tequila instead of churches. When his dominoes toppled over, there wasn't a single person left in Pilsen who could still stand, the chip on his shoulder burning a cigarette hole in the sky. But all fires need to be fed. Like my uncle, starving in Chicago, swearing that when he becomes the sun he will never let anything on the green earth grow.

How My Sister Became the Fourth Sun

It was an accident. We built the sacrificial bonfire but none of our elders wanted to jump. They were too busy with the accusations of elemental affairs — stealing each other’s thunder. My sister was 19, wearing their coke goggles again, the ones that made the fire look like a light show. A holograph. Evolution, and they were a moth. When they became the sun, it caused a lot of trouble for the rest of us. We kept getting calls of the sun stumbling into dive bars, singing What’s Love Got to Do With It long into the night. The sun making a mess at the laundromat, convinced they are the king of clean clothes and soap suds, their crown lost in a lint trap. For years, my mother begged me to go get my sister and bring them home. My mother believes it is still possible, to bring them home. She buys white velas and siete machos from the botanica down the street. Takes an egg and passes it over the sky, hides clementine rinds in the horizon. The women in my family still believe in medicines, in daughters. Even after my sister takes me to their pawn shop and makes me their queen. They brush coffee grounds out of my hair, dig alarm bells out of my mouth. When they are done taking everything they can sell or swap or smoke, they hand me my rib cage for comfort, the bones already licked clean.

I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City*

My cousin comes home smelling like a crematorium & looking like he held the body while it died. I know better than to ask where he’s been. Every week a new story – Rockaway Beach, Williamsburg, the Lower East Side – always New York. Even though we live states away. Even though he skips the train turnstiles because he can’t pay fare. Who’s gonna tell him that New York is a dream not a destination for people like us? At 15, Sebastían is a handful of salt no one wants to swallow, but everyone is willing to throw over their shoulder to make the luck stick. After he became the sun, the foster families I found never worked out. Sebi burned holes into the carpet. Sebi left scorch marks on the bed. Sebi burned my eyebrows off my forehead. Knowing him, I’m sure it was on purpose. I’m also sure they earned it, which was the part they always left out. I tried to warn them, you just have to give him some time & the light will find you, but no one wanted to wait that long for an investment to pay off. Every few years, he lands back in this apartment he hates, with me & all my failures. We don’t talk about the things we don’t talk about. But some nights, when he’s cleaned the sky clear, we sit out on the fire escape & smoke, swearing that one of these days, we’ll wake up in that city like we deserve to be there.

*The title of this section comes from a song by Harry Nilsson with the same name

Tercio de Varas

Spring has delivered her shipment of rain,
& so we are preparing to kill each other.
Like all good things, it takes practice. Years
spent wandering the corridors of her querencia,
searching her hips for the softest cut of earth,
humming Celia Cruz into the hem of her stucco-
clad skin. I spent years loving her
before we learned to hurt each other,
in our house filled with beautiful, chipped, ordinary
things. During the summer we’d turn our bed
into a kiln of clay-fired limbs; the kitchen
decorated with our ceramic laughter fading
to dust. All I am is an animal wagoned with want,
& she is a ticker tape parade, marching Mexico
City to our Plaza de Toros, the place where dreams
go to slaughter, chanting come, come and watch
how we make victors of each other.

Tercio de Banderillas

In the ring across from me, my Cintrón stands
gold dipped, light draped, talavera tiled,
her eyes a cenote I sink straight through
until there I am, in the barrel of her body.
At point blank range, what stills us is the safety
of memory. Above my head is a limestone
starred sky, sure heaven, shaped in
the hollow of her lung cavity. Where she hides
the film strips from our first date. A carnival
where we conquered the drop tower,
that day when I fell & fell & forgot
to be afraid. Mayor of mischief, she stole
a fish from the plastic pool, a slice of sky
stuck in a ziplock bag. That was how
she loved me. With less oxygen than
enough. Back then, my heart was a fistful
of sea & she carried me—she carried me.


Tercio de Muerte

At the end of the aisle waits my milonguera,
veil of miracles swinging from her hair,
red carnations scorching at the desert
of her feet. Above us wave the mesquite trees
who stood witness to our growing up. Every afternoon
in that tiny living room, light would drip through
the open windows, past all the furniture we found
on the side of the road, and I was sure without
measure that this was the most blessed of times.
The future I fought for, those nights dark as well
water, when each hour was another poured.
I vowed to find her: the woman whose hands
could make even the agave leaves soften.
Even me, with my pulque lungs. As she reaches
for me, clarity rises from the riverbank of our
embrace. I have loved her with the length
of my life, & she has earned her kill.

after Mathias Svalina

#08262 You are standing in a misshapen alley, cursing the bus for never staying on schedule and yourself for still believing in buses. It is winter in Michigan, and you imagine there is no worse place to be a person than winter in Michigan, but the Michiganders keep telling you to buck up, there is no such thing as bad weather. You, a sane person, know there is, in fact, such a thing as bad weather, so you step sideways into an old church. But the church is not a church, it is an off-broadway musical. The director comes to you and says “Meryl Streep?” “There’s been a mistake,” you say, “I’m not Meryl Streep,” but you are whisked away to a changing room full of hats. You are asked to remove all your clothes and don as many hats as you wish. You learn hats make terrible skirts. You step out on stage wearing hats that are selectively placed and you learn, mortified, than when they said to remove all your clothes they only meant street clothes, and there was a beautifully made ballgown hanging on the back of your door, which was also a net, and which was supposed to catch you whole, your body also belonging to a yellow snapper, who opens its mouth and swallows the theater covered in snow.

#47511 You are wandering around a very large Ikea, and for several hours you make bets on which couples will break up over duvet covers. You develop a complicated scoring system based on how many times one checks the LSU game and how many times the other says “this isn’t right, right?” but when you start looking for an exit, the painted arrows point inwards. It’s been weeks, and you’ve seen the Ikea signs change from Christmas sales to Valentines Day layaways but you can’t seem to find who is changing them. You gorge on swedish-definitely-not-horse-meatballs and caramel-definitely-not-addiction-forming-cinnabons, and on the 100th day of being held hostage you find that the Ikea is not an Ikea at all, it is a diorama of an Ikea. You are a messy third grader’s school project. You understand now why your arm only bends up to a 70 degree angle, and why the couples never seem to fall out of love so much as fall out of the frame.

#73856 You walk into a bar and it’s filled with every person you have ever had sex with, but they don’t know that. This is somehow both your worst nightmare and every other Tuesday at the JewelBox, which brings in every butch who thought Bend it like Beckham should’ve ended with the two female leads falling in love. You sit down at the bar, because at this point it would be rude to leave. Joanne, your bartender and one night stand from six months ago, has recognized you. Joanne pours a doubleshot into a glass, but instead of liquid it’s just her faking her orgasms. The whole room stares, and you don’t know what to do, so you take a sip. You try to thank her but your mouth is full of fake moaning. All you can think is how impolite it is to talk with your mouth full, and how you desperately want to spit the sound into your napkin. Later, you’ll wish you did. For weeks, your stomach becomes the bat signal for straight men. They keep coming up to you in public as though their services are needed, asking if they can watch.