Maricela Guerrero
Two Poems Translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers
Introductions
Here, 557 kilometers east, heading toward the Mexico State Beltway, following GPS directions for seven hours and thirty-three minutes without stopping, I could reach a forest where no wolves have been sighted since 1976—the Canis lupus baileyi, whose weight can range between 55 and 104 pounds, or roughly the weight of my first child, who turns twelve years old this fall.
Now foreign construction companies have been brought in to fell trees and bring progress and drainage and services and a better life for you and your family: stop paying rent and become a homeowner! says the ad where a white man embraces an olive-skinned woman and they reach protective arms around a beaming boy and girl.
After seven hours and twenty-three minutes on the international highway to Oaxaca and then turning toward Tehuantepec, following directions, we could reach San Pedro y San Pablo Ayutla, which is adjacent to Tamazulapan del Espíritu Santo. The two towns dispute municipal lines and a natural spring.
Ayutla uses a map that was found in the Orozco y Berra archive: a blueprint of the village of Ayutla, District of Villa Alta, 1907, measuring 47x73 centimeters, corresponding to file cabinet label CGOAXX01 and classification number 3055-CGE-7272, clearly conveying that the spring becomes and augurs peace.
More than forty days have passed and people with guns still patrol the spring and many cells ask questions in unusual mineral languages.
In varied vernacular languages they ask questions of the lakes and the mountains; in many languages, millions of cells seek peace and becoming.
Becoming words in flowing water:
syllables, sounds, varied and unusual combinations
of phonemes
resounding
like a group of trees:
poplars, pine groves, crop fields, jungles, woods:
the vacant lot next door:
shared breath resounding: breath
ungasped, unanguished,
a respite millions of light years away:
your eyes,
your eyelashes,
just imagine that, Ms. Olmedo would say,
your heart expanding: springs springing forth in hazy possible languages in organic
and inorganic chemicals and lungs and the vacant lot next door inhabit:
shared air:
cells dreaming of cells
morulas
aloe vera
peppermint
elm
fir and maple
wolf
we’re not alone:
we
are here.
Fear
Let’s go back to the fear of extraction.
It’s said that if they come for us we won’t even realize it.
It’s said that if they come for us I won’t even try to look for you.
It’s said that they’ll come for us and each one of us will be carried off alone.
It’s like the movie about the clownfish.
It’s like the movie about the little girl who goes looking for her mother in the company of an alien.
It’s like E.T., when my dad stayed with me in the theater while my mom took my brother outside to calm him down.
It’s like the time I thought she wasn’t coming back.
It’s like the times I was terrified that my dad would get abducted by aliens when he went out drinking and I’d never see him again.
It’s like the time I told my mom her dress was ugly and she didn’t pick me up from school.
It’s like the bird who twists her foot while having an adventure with a boy scout and
an old man and her baby chicks keep cheep-cheeping to her in the distance.
It’s like every place where mining creates desolate wastelands under the open sky.
It’s like the workers’ housing units and construction plots that haven’t been paid off
and are left scattered with empty rooms.
I know it’s cold, that it’s as frightening as when you reach out your fingers and
touch some viscous, grimy substance instead of a warm, familiar hand. I know
there’s something to be done inside the hole. That maybe it’s worth feeling
through the fear together: collecting it: taking samples of fear for careful study.
Embracing fear until it curls up beside us and falls asleep.
There’s a light by your bed, a succulent plant.
In oxygen, in vine, in air, in wolf: there’s an entire language of enzymes and biomolecules
beyond and within: shared breath and dreams of cells becoming cells:
Cells, it’s always about cells: about breath, exchange, reproduction, differentiation.
The animal’s asleep beside your bed.
It snorts.
I have a hunch that there was room for everyone.