THE PLACE MY MOTHER WRITES FROM

A planet filled with glowing fish, abandoned pillars, breath of asteroids, living moving clouds that speak. The planet’s overpowering ocean and its purple afternoon skies. Messages she sends her friends in flashing smoke. To see her loved ones, she must spin out ladders of damask and cornsilk, ladders that cross space and memory. People find a way to cross. They speak with her for days about the huge fjord of space. Her fine lunar shells, space whales beached on icy stones, the birds of yellow fire that only sang notes from a scale no one had heard. She said with her smile, Take what you truly need, my child. At the top of the mountains, see her open, arched hands, with lilac veins, with the softness of water reflecting life, with all the pains of mystery and loss held quiet. For this moment, the sky, for love of her hands, folds and moves and lights itself stretched over her fingers, like a beautiful headdress for a newborn girl.

by Itzolin Valdemar García, 1975-2003
from beatlick