(for Sergio Mondragón)
1. The body's hidden face removed of its excesses is cooked into a codex that reads: this little piggy went to market this little piggy piled high illuminates what's meant by surface. Everywhere a nation awaits, a cardboard raft soaks through. Everywhere is a drink of water swimming with the dead: Leagues that can't be reached or spoken. 2. A man in the plaza sweats beneath the synthetic hide of historical sacrifice and does a dance making tourists in t-shirts feel so alive. Far north an altar will be built for the seamstress forgotten in piecing such garments. 3. The question, as we sit by the grill, becomes: What is the real animal between us? What skin do we stretch, scrape and tension with our desire for expansion? For books that leap like bodies not our own? So we can never end with more or less than this: What does it mean to start here, with a taco de chicharrón, as if to say "fushigi na en" the encounter and consumption of skin launches every ship?
"Fushigi na en" is related to the Japanese concept of fate or destiny—i.e., when two people are bound to meet or feel a connection upon meeting. Chicharrón is fried pork rind.
Copyright © 2011 by Rosa Alcala. Used with permission of the author.