Xochiquetzal Candelaria

The woman in the building across from me hauls onto the fire escape a yucca plant and squeezes it between a crate of herbs and a sapling fern tree. She looks a lot like me from twenty feet away. A forelock lies sweaty against her cheek as if she’s forgotten to fix herself. I put my thumbs and forefingers to my eye and frame her. I am reminded of those Chinese boxes made of red paper, inside one is another holding another, until at the center sits the tiniest mockery and celebration of the cell itself. She looks haggard but happy here, five flights up, bending over a fat leaf as if admiring herself in the waxy surface. Then she opens up the jewel-case of her voice, and I remember how once my sister asked my mother which one of us sang better. My mother paused from sewing as if adding seventeen to seventy-five and said we sounded the same. Good or bad, who knows. Each of us now watches the empty, open mouth of the other.

is the six-chambered cylinder, the spinnable heart, how it clicks into place, lonely but strong by design. She understands its negative worth, how it holds in the dark and withstands what is held, how it burns and smells of smoke when left and left and left.

This boy lying face down in my sleep pushes around jars of jelly, waking me the night he is found so I can drag him from the wet ground and clean his blackened belly, this boy lying face down who is somehow bound to me, this hunted herdsman, refugee waking me the night he is found. Am I to dress him in an open gown, bless the holes in his chest with tea leaves? This boy lying face down, permeating even the simplest sound, with the crack in the door he slowly cries, waking me the night he is found, lips parted to my blue-black ground, whispering red vetch inside me, this slender boy lying down, waking me the night he is found.