Querida M.,
I love your broken sidewalks
like crooked teeth, such snaggletooth style.
I love your adobe, yeso,
repello, and thousand layers of rich paint like ice cream.
I love your icecream vendors
on tricycles--
--I love your tricycles! Big,
yellow, ready for elotes, chayotes, steaming in steel vats; for garrafones,
fierro viejo, babies--
--I love your babies. Babies
walking down the street. Babies on rooftops, babies on motorcycles, bedtime
abolished, total kid freedom now!
I love your papel picado with
its sacred hearts cut from pink plastic like vulvas strung from tejado to
tejado, they sparkle, they touch specific notes in my chest, the wind they
dance in pushes me through narrow streets faster, urgent, viene la lluvia.
Jasmín. Gardenia. Bugambilia
(¡me muero!) that glows at dusk like that taxista told us.
I love your mountains, each
sacred, that bless us with water. Huitepec, Moxviquil, Tzontewitz.
I love your Tz'otzil glottal
stops and bright ribbons braided into black hair.
I love your tortillas con
sal, your anything with chile y limón.
I love your rivers, Grijalva,
La Venta, Usumacinta, Lacantún, even Sabinal choking on sewage, cedars rising
above the city.
I love you when you pull me
outside of myself, when kind strangers, new streets, meals shared lift me and
lift me and lift me and I float, way above the red roofs and trees trapped in
courtyards, reaching upwards.
I love your vocales en mi
boca.
I love your infinite
invention, bicycle knife-sharpeners, and your eyes, unromantic, returning
power's gaze.
I love the many lessons of
slowness you have given me, I shiver at your latent strength.
I love the way you have
destroyed my plans, one by one, until I understood they were never real in the
first place.
I love your grime, the sweat
and the contact and the noise and the blood have not been bleached,
shrink-wrapped, disinfected, hyper-inspected: your bare hands carve delicate
ribbons of raw beef, take my wadded-up cash, and pass me my change with a bag
of fat and bones for the neighborhood dogs.
For all these things, and
others still,
I love you and I thank you.
Atentamente,
Genevieve
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