Broken Light

A poem

“Leaves of Wild Ginger” (Aoi), from the Phantom Genji Scrolls. New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Femicide is an ongoing issue around the world. On the average, ten women and girls are kidnapped, raped and murdered across Mexico every day. As a bereaved mother myself, I cannot help identifying with mothers around the world whose children are victims of senseless violence and endless war, perpetrated by men in power. This poem is a grief-stricken love song to mothers. May justice erupt from heartbreak.

Broken Light

The bus pulls into Ciudad Juarez
just as the sun touches the tops of the maquilas
and spills into the filthy factory windows
where my baby ran away to work for the pendejos. 
Sunlight like blood.
Like her blood
which I can't stop seeing whenever I close my eyes.
Flowing from her lips,
her wrists,
from between her torn apart legs.
Blood flowing into the silent desert,
nourishing nothing.

So I try not to close my eyes.

But they accidentally drifted shut on the bus last night
somewhere between mi pueblo in San Luis Potosi
and this borderland of screaming ghost girls,
this infierno that tears and chews and gulps our daughters,
that swallowed my girl,
mi Lucia,
light of her father's broken heart.
Broken light.
Body broken like a pinata.
Like a glass bottle.
Like the yolk of an egg.

I can’t do this.

I cannot fucking do this.
No one could possibly expect a mother
to identify the body of her child.
I got the message yesterday
as I was plucking the needles from a basket of nopal.
Nopal is good for the diabetes,
which I think I have.
As if it mattered now.
I returned their call
from the telephone office next to the parque.
They warned me:
mutilation;
partial decomposition;
anguish carved into her dead face.

I practice picturing these things.

While her father slips into a cerveza coma
I board the bus and imagine her unraveling.
Her long hair yanked and severed.
A nipple bitten off.
Cigarette burns on her neck and eyelids.
A man grunting like a cochino.
Two others laughing.
One more turns away, maybe,
and pukes in the Sonoran night.

There is no one to meet me
when I climb down from the bus.
My knees buckle and I stumble.
Swiftly, I regain my balance,
restore my dignity,
smooth my long braids
which have been suddenly shot with silver
in the weeks since Lucia disappeared.
I shift my satchel across one breast
and unfold for the hundredth time
the sheet of graph paper
with directions to the city morgue.

I begin walking.

Duermete mi nina.
Duermete mi sol.
Duermete pedazo
de mi corazon.

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