Poem for Selena, 1997

by Luciana Callegari

 

Because my mother has been thinking of the cruel woman
who murdered Selena Quintanilla, how the witch is soon
to be released from the cold confines of her Texas cell,
she suggests we watch the movie made in the Tejana’s name–

so that whenever Jennifer Lopez swings her hips into a smile
across the Houston Astrodome, she can sigh into a Qué lástima, qué
    ​    ​barbaridad. What a loss,
she can’t sit through much, but slips into a nineties Texas,
into the refurbished tour bus carrying Selena and her family

down the dusty interstate into fame. Her father disapproves
of the sparkled bustiers she sports on stage, but her mother
glues the jewels to the cups. Her father fires the guitarist
she falls for, but my mother loves him like he’s a brother in law.

Selena didn’t speak Spanish, not until her father placed the mic
in her hands and said:
    ​    ​this is what we’re going to do, because you’re Mexican,
and music is about more than Donna Summer. So her mother
teaches her cumbia, and her sister plays the drums. When your mother says

she can do that dance too, you believe it though you’ve never seen it.
It takes the two hours for Selena to go from ten to nothing, when the president
of her fan club sends her crashing down the Corpus Christi hotel carpet,
gunshot to the shoulder. What a loss, it shouldn’t have killed her,

but it did. And once it does, the camera pans back to the silent Astrodome,
circling the lonely mic one final time. In the quiet of her bedroom,
it doesn’t take my mother long to go back to Honduras–

this time the General Cemetery, where tombs pile over each other
like crates on a warehouse shelf, hundreds of bodies crowding
upon one another’s resting place. How she can’t help but to count
those in the decaying vessels, siblings and children of her Tía Dilma,
plucked one by one then laid to rest. Silent, head shaking

in the night. My mother says, in Spanish, that this life is fucked up,
that Yolanda Saldivar should rot for killing Selena. And though
she hasn’t visited in years, announces:
    ​    ​I don’t care. When I die, I would like to be buried there,
    ​    ​    ​with my family,
stacked under the burning sun, before turning over and nestling
    ​    ​​into the covers.