wildscape. literary journal

Wind Narrative
by Genaro Aguilar Saucillo

(note: this poem is best viewed on a desktop)

The hills are a handful of knuckles under the grass,
                                               a lesson in how a country learns to sleep on its dead.
                                                            I stand where the shadow of a tree stitches my ankles
to the earth — a tree without leaves, just bone,
                           just the memory of fruit.                               What are you thinking about? 
I'm thinking about them  — two strangers crossing the field,
            their dresses fluttering like orchids in the wind, 
as if they offered 
                         their bodies to this quiet.            Back home, my mother folds tortillas
into moons — yezana, offerings. On the news, a new unnamed face
              surfaces among yo nujmú. 
     We call it mourning, but here 
                          it reeks of windburned grass. 

                 I have become the seam the hill stitches shut. 
   The mountains I left behind, 
                                                   dogs barking at yo paa, our days, 
the stony trail swallowing our tongue 
                                                                                      and spitting back its foreign alphabet.
                                                                          I think of the fathers that never return
— by choice,
                                                       or lifted off the road like brush — how we inherit a silence
and polish it into a benched grammar. 
                                                    We are told to bow our faces to the uncut sky, 
            though it never whispers our names back. 
                  A branch points toward this pale arch
                         and they ask us to call that doorway home. 
I want to say I am safe, I do, 
                                                                 that distance uncrooks a landscape, 
                                      but my bones crackle in the wind
                                                                 of every border they crossed, 
                                                  all our names beneath the orchard back home.
           I press my ear to the hill. It beats. It beats.
                                                            Who have you become in this bright, razored field?
I have become the bare branches,
                                                            the shadow, the deer.

                                                                            I’m thinking of both my mothers 
                                                              meandering these plains, 
                       turning the grass until their faces 
                                                 flicker in the roots  —
again.


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Notes (in Jñatjo, or mazahua):
Yezana= two moons
Yo nujmú= the harvest
Yo paa= those who go; the days 
**NOTE: This poem was originally published in Rattle's Ekphrastic Challenge.

about the author // Genaro Aguilar Saucillo