Audience
You will no longer hear my voice,
Manzana spoke aloud to an empty
audience, the last image of the lover fading.
Echo waves that met mother earth
at gravesite—gravel, huachichil humming
in yellow, rise & fall, a bouquet of gardenias, alto
en canto ascends over montaña.
To climb uphill one carries a life worn.
Worn to life.
Where worry meet the lived.
Live, you said...
may the sun kiss your skin, daily.
I did. I do.
...
Film of dust
enter.
...
Adelante, footprints.
Of whom has laid the land before...
to where to turn,
who to ask;
the interrogatives: ye ye, chica
the land answers to no one.
...
Unfasten, first the neck.
Red bandana, left behind,
white dress pinned on cactus, sore—
we go inward
of the thing that must be named—
thorn, poison, despair.
...
Does grief pick those who are wounded?
Yes.
How much longer?
I’m not sure.
Does it feel good?
No comment.
...
Nude, left to right, I swing.
Hips shadow,
breasts throb
& sweat.
I come closer.
Pant, I let you go, mi Verde.
...
What did I do to get here?
Everything.
...
Me muero
de tanto esperar.
This waiting, my wailing
—silently, pleasurably...
the way a snake bites its tail.
What did you expect?
This space
stalling.
Un día vas a voltear
a buscarme
y ya no
voy estar.
...
Until the end of time, here
stands the manzana trees we gardened
& bloomed.
The trees are dying from drought
because it hadn’t been fed.
Red shrivel red.
Green losing green.
Maybe if I repeat Lorca will still this grief.
No hands like yours could touch the soil
& bring the rain. Sing to plants, my, I still
can hear your voice like violet.
Sing to my garden,
dying.
...
Green skies.
Green paloverdes.
Green-thorned heart I cup in hand,
beaming, bleeding.
...
Long, black hair below hips,
I see the ghost of women running
to mountain peak boombox & corridos
reverberating.
This is the last image I carry of mountain.
She must’ve been so still for the exiles to greet
as they exhaled their last grief uphill,
to look below
and see their stiff bodies
mold in rock.
Relief.
Copyright © 2023 by Maritza N. Estrada. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 26, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
“My homes are in the mountains and desert—of where I was birthed by my mother, encouraged to dream as a child by my father and abuelita, and be autonomous in this lonely, tender road of manejo—love, desire, abundance, wonder, death, and grief. I am montaña. I am grateful for every person I’ve crossed paths with on this road and for the homes gardened, fed in Washington, Nebraska, Arizona, México, and Paris. A ritual to the land and a reaching for an unmastered language, I turned to my mentors, Natalie Diaz and Solmaz Sharif, beloveds, and family, in prayer and aching to have to bury many dead loved ones, gone, gone. Dead. What may come after, I am still searching.”
—Maritza N. Estrada
Maritza N. Estrada
