Cornflowers

She says my hair smells like corn tortillas. I raise an eyebrow. After all those honeysuckle and papaya shampoos, I can’t believe my scalp hasn’t soaked up the scent of blossom or the perfume of rainfall. No, she’s my mother, and she insists that even as a little girl, my whole bedroom breathed corn tortillas. Pressing nose to pillowcase, I search for masa, reach back before molcajete and plow to a dusky meadow, its bed of soil flecked with teosinte, ancestor grasses. Up through the dark follicles of my skull covered in sun-cracked husks, push the black-brown silk strands, cocooning thirsty kernels. Maíz sprouts into fields of thought bearing hybrid rows of words that fall like teeth from the mouths of the dead.