The Gospel of Ometéotl, the Brown Adam

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.