A Torero’s Daughter is Killed in La Plaza de Toros, Juárez, and: I Light the House on Fire and Lie Down
- A Torero’s Daughter is Killed in La Plaza de Toros, Juárez, and: I Light the House on Fire and Lie Down
A Torero’s Daughter is Killed in La Plaza de Toros, Juárez
The bull runs through the gates, a tiny bride is on its back. Her gown bigger than her body, the lace turns brown—trails through the arena.
Could he sing a melody to keep her quiet, a melody to keep the crowd awake?
The torero thinks how beautiful the blood would soak into the satin folds, how her hair would come undone, become the rope to drag her.
He leans into his cape, the bull parades her, his daughter, quinceañera, around the stadium.
He wants to carry her across the rose covered dirt into the desert, and then home. Knock down a wall, place her in its empty and seal her inside.
He wants to see the white of her, feel her draw circles with her eyes across his blood strained-neck.
He wants to know the pain his daughter felt while still alive. Skull broken in the backseat of a car, mouth open as a bull’s eye. [End Page 103]
I Light the House on Fire and Lie Down
on my kitchen floor to feel the ants search the hidden sugars on my body. They are a crown at my head, above me leaves
are suspended from the ceiling, leaves that float up to the bare light bulb that is to them a moon. In my mind I solve the slope
between each ant and its corresponding leaf: m= y2-y1/x2-x1 Such rise over my head with the turn
of a compass, I imagine you far away: a deer, a raptor, an exoskeleton covered in bright earth. The ants perform mass
around me, in them I remember: the border agent, how he put his hand on your head, how he lead you
to the car, how he arrested your body. I want to think he blessed you against the chemicals, the hose
they would spray you with. When he called you: Illegal, he asked how I’d made love to an angel of other, [End Page 104]
how our bodies had not shattered in such sin, how you could bring such quiet. As the leaves burn
I can see the ants form the contours of your face—geography of a body I cannot begin to measure. [End Page 105]
Natalie Scenters-Zapico is a fronteriza poet from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas and Juárez, México. She is an MFA candidate at the University of New Mexico and is Managing Editor of Blue Mesa Review. Her work has appeared in The Minnesota Review, The Acentos Review, and Bellevue Literary Review.
