my family is from atoyac, jalisco. it’s a beautiful place. if you look it up on the internet,
wikipedia will tell you that atoyac is just a municipality in mexico. that’s a lie. atoyac means place where the river runs, and everyone knows that the only thing in this world as gentle yet as deadly as a river is a woman, therefore atoyac is a woman. she knows secrets that you don’t - at dusk dusty winds blow past your ear through which she whispers the sweet respite of night. atoyac is a woman, she is my woman, she is the tia i first met in tall tales when the sun shattered over the horizon like a glass bottle of wine. she hides me little secrets treasures between the two of us - a scorpion in my sneakers, a dewdrop on a succulent, a silver halo moon-glow cast over the wispy hair that frames my face - desert hair, wild, volcanic, the hair that i was born with, and i know that i am a desert sobrina with my desert skin and desert palms, with my cactus heart and my rattlesnake mouth, with my flash flood moods and my running river poems. atoyac is a woman, temperamental like a woman should be, treat her with disrespect, she’ll burn your nose, bite your heels, and you can’t make yourself feel anger because you know what you deserve. since it was you who dared to venture into the desert, climb the rocky heart of a woman, lick up the last of her coursing capillary creeks. it was you who ran her dry into the drought, you who raised up the grass golf courses and palm resorts in places that deserved desolation, you who left her at her low, you who broke her spirit, you who starved her children, you, the Catholic missionary, you, the NAFTA signatory, you, the American tourist on spring break, you who spilled the sacred blood of her red sandstone wrists, you who stole her name and gave her a new one. so when her midday hips burn your flaky white skin and her nighttime snowfall turns your feet purple (no sunscreen can save you) you will bow your head in shame and take it. take it like a man. i think it’s funny - to take a pueblo where the days are long but the nights feel longer a pueblo that leaves your knuckles cracked and your tongue thirsty for more a pueblo that is calaca dry and to name it atoyac to name it, place where the river runs. but isn’t that womanly? who would, other than a desert, other than a woman, hold within her the divine memory of a history measured not in years or in numbers but in stacked layers of sediment, revealed through the soft lullaby of tecolote timescales a history of bodies of water that once ran deep, of twilight lakes that mirrored the fish-hook moon, of a riverbed that tasted like rest and abundance who would, other than a desert, other than a woman, name herself after what she has lost, carve herself open with the knife of her lifeblood, to draw her daughters in close to the stars, wrap them in the hot summer winds, and whisper in their ears, el río solía correr a través de mí.
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About MeHi! I'm Andrea. I really like words. Categories
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