Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers on Community

Margo Tamez

Margo Tamez Mexican-Amerindian/Nde-Dne/Cohuila One at a Time Autumn ı∫∫∏, for Angelito “There is a hunger for order but a thirst against.” —Linda Gregg 1 Two crisp sunflowers are small enough and will fit into the weave of your palm-size casket. I am pouring you into water. The equinox, midwifery and practical herbs unraveling the flesh between us. I felt you and still you enclose me. I bargain with God for a reversal. Life’s fragility, the inflexible end excessive. The small altar on the counter. Votives hover around me, my body is an apparition, hermetic, like you, just that far off from my grasp. You go through me everywhere. I say you will pass beyond in four days. 54 2 I herd goats from the crisp corn field. June’s last planting, they munch the fodder, carefully eyeing me, unwilling to be stopped, though I was competent. They saw my stick and turned tail, straight to their corral. They look at me, pissed, but put up with it. The strain in my pelvis became hard after the hog’s regular feeding. Getting him fattened for a spring slaughter. I walk a different path back, notice a familiar scent—the astringent stamen, the red vulvas in the season’s devil claws releasing their love-juice for the pollinators. A cluster eaten out bare by a moth’s tenacious mouth. Entering, and re-entering. All the world shifts. I bend to draw in their scent, press my face into their pollen. Their scent is on me and I back up nearly falling to the ground, pluck a handful and rush away. 55 The bugles of a tobacco tree trumpet a faded yellow song. I follow a worn path to the house, gather new corn pollen, elder going to berry. 3 All the candles in the house self-extinguish. The ones from Mexico, hand-painted “Tu y Yo,” the last ones to go out, tiny wicks curling under the clear pool of wax . . . My husband asks are you ready? we walk onto the moist ground he prepares for the ceremony. You are sacred, this life we gave you taken. I pull on a chair to stand. The tremor in my body like an unraveling rope that gets away no matter where my hands grasp. Me, you, his eyes, his look. I know again how awful this becomes. He looks up at sky, a weightless altar, the sun a witness to what happens, and I don’t feel better, cedar, the eagle feather, the prayers don’t stop this shriveling, this anger, this fist I’ve become. 56 Term The moon of my stomach, curved wide and round catches what its wants— the moon’s pale light. She sees her body here. Nothing ever stops not living or dead. At the ninth new moon tough, winding kicks and strumming on my ribs . . . like a call to one more gradual death. Inside I’m on the verge, the place of nowhere else but out, the child’s exchange of water for air. Next to me my man-raven, his strands of steel-blue light. I touch their fragile glow without waking child or man. I am every noise before dawn’s lips suck in the dew of a late monsoon. Moon stomach, rolling, heavy movement. 57 Life of me, of him, of moonlight. There is nothing else I feel except the pulling weight. Eating then sleep, there’s more to you than me. Pressing your head hard smoothing the muscle the sacred passageway to the above world. Until her tenth face, night’s pale eye, surfaces again. Your motion, beyond what skin can give. And him, his smooth slope of hip I want to swallow, want this moment still, to shed the mammoth allow time to kiss tenderly my wounds, and open again, tentatively . . . just one body, to his. 58 Limp Strings I am driving home, the weekend ahead planting garlic and grading freshman essays on the brain.Did he get to the dishes, or are they piled to greet me. Milpa cries, her mouth’s wet rim quivers, echoes my jangled pessimism, a wicked necklace, the O of her mouth comes to me fast before the blur of my neighbor’s field of alfalfa and sky. I try not to swerve while my fingers snatch the...