2018 Alfred Boas Poetry Prize

 

 

My mom turned into a giant toad. 

I found her in Aguascalientes,

in the jutted rocky

of El Cerro del Muerto. 

 

A swarm of locusts 

sashayed in secrecy 

around us. 

 

Her brown skin, 

now gleamed green. 

 

Her once thin body,

now bulbous and mottled

left no trace of her soft wrinkles. 

 

Her toes, still calloused

looked like plastic cauliflower, 

and her legs, even thinner now, 

tapped tapped tapped

to a tune only she could hear. 

 

Gone was the metal plaque 

that ran along her right hip. 

Had fixed her limp. Chueca, 

my father would call her. 

Now, she wasn’t crooked. 

 

Gone was the jagged scar 

that ran across her stomach. 

The place of incision

where doctors ripped

me out of her womb,

and my brother,

and my sister too. 

 

Her chest ballooned, 

summoned the sounds 

of a caged monster.

Croaked things

she had never told me before. 

 

She said she was 16

when she left México.

She cheated death in Juárez, 

squeezed through the slit

of a bathroom window, 

escaped a serial rapist.

She was all over the news, 

 

She told me she forgave 

her mother

and her father,

and I should too. 

 

Then she regurgitated her insides, 

hurled a fountain of flesh and flies,

left a hollow carcass at my feet, crooned