J. Michael Martinez

as the meat within the shell as the shell before the caw a bleached weed a fig dusted to sweet the skin egg albumen of peacock butterfly held to the ivory of oxen hoof pulling the space between sins                    I am as I am so the host                             on the tongue God of Bread complexion of conquest the salt of Lot as God is a crown of thorn diadem of wheat so am I the echo calling fossil back to name amaranth ash                    spread across the light

The Body as Nature, History All motivations intermingle as the core of history, the internal becomes external... all as parts of the body. — maurice merleau-ponty i.               the positing of space, corporeal history medium of my body

Wherein she martyrs the mirror: this carnival of stone, her lips dilate the negation—space into starpoint Wherein she, to be both sacrum & wrist— neither the fugitive epidermis, nor the unlocked ashblack— sovereigns the shadow swell as love Wherein she ardors the emptiness open, proof the unanchored Spirit of my silence, her revisions clothing my brightest orgasm— Wherein she says, I can hear you, the seed under the belly’s flesh—love the far shore, she says, For She withdraws the Spring wild Thrust in her mother’s surrender, iron ocean blackened to aurora.

When she was seven, my grandmother suffered from fever and swollen glands. The doctors believed her tonsils were inflamed, that she needed surgery. Instead, she went to a curandera. The curandera divined that a jealous relative had cast a curse on her and, now, her language of kindness was bound to her throat, the unspoken swelling her glands. As a child my grandmother spoke to santitos with a voice like a chestnut: ruddy and warm, seeds dropping from her mouth. The santitos would take her words into themselves, her voice growing within them like grapevines. During the tonsillitis, when the words no longer fell like seeds from her lips, the santito's vineyards of accent and voice grew vapid, dry as a parched mouth. They went to her tongue and asked why silence imprisoned the words of the child, why lumps were present under her chin, why tears drew channels down her cheeks. I asked my grandmother how her tongue replied. After touching my cheek, she told me she had a dream that night: She was within her lungs and she rose like breath through the moist of her throat. She remembered her tonsils swinging before her like fleshy apples, then a hand taking them into a fist, harvesting their sound. She told me her throat opened in two spots like insect eyes and the names of her children came flying through her wounds like peacocks. Patting my thigh, she said, "That is why the name of your mother is Maria, because she is a prayer, a song of praise to the Holy Mother." She told me this, then showed me two scars on her throat—tiny scars, like two eyelids stitched closed.

People walk through you, the wind steals your voice, you’re a burra, buey, scapegoat, forerunner of a new race, half and half — both woman and man, neither — a new gender. —Gloria Anzaldúa Jasmine garlands thin for the rib’s cartilage ring. The heart shudders with pure mission. She spreads & knows herself as Adam, Ometéotl, but through himself, Omecíhuatl, he is Eve. He knows but what the garden gives: the garden’s soot awakened tongueless in root. Cerise chrysantha coils around his leg. Gathering the tides of the seas to his side, she conceives where impossibilities seed. Clarity burning coal,                he takes two knots of grass & strings four birds-of-paradise through the ceiba’s rotted leaves: she fashions the sorrows from winter’s purse, sea & sun sifted for sum. Entrammeled, Ometéotl rises one among one body stitched in strange altar.