Ruth Irupé Sanabria

A spirit came down and whispered in our drunk ears mark your wombs with wild roses and between beers I dreamed that we were soldiers missing our mothers which explains why we are seventeen and in a tattoo parlor that smells of ships and motorcycles, of leather and ocean, of marijuana and sad men’s blood. We each ask for a single rose with a ribbon around the stem, for a word, some power. We want to be fire. The artist changes channels. We watch Looney Tunes as his needles start. When we stop at the liquor store, our roses, orange and violet, bleeding through the bandages, I want to tell you that if we ever find ourselves blindfolded in a war, or in an apple metaphor, accused of ruining it for everybody with hunger, or knowledge, I would not insist on how sacred is the tree or the light, or how sacred is what moves us— I’d become a storyteller. And out of our inevitable estrangement I’d make us up again and again.

Story takes her skin. Story takes her bones. She finds her toes and her fingertips. When she speaks, like salmon running, the dead and the living converge. The river of memory rocks the hunger of claws and tongues. Electricity swallows itself back through its double-prod picana, bullets dislodge themselves from their chore of destroying the same day over and over again, and from the caverns of fear and revision, skin resurrects the skin. Each sentence closes in like the crawl of split skin sealing its red, wet avulsion. The enormity of the pending night scares the seven assassins on trial. They understand that in hell, they will eat their own throats.