My love
This morning mamá came into the kitchen
and handed me her morral
My love
You dug out an ancestral pain
inherited from my grandmother
to my mother
to me
My love
Mi mama, she has always told me que
las penas con pan son menos
So I make myself a taco
with all that she’s gifted me
inside her morral
Her pain
neatly wrapped and tucked in cloth
like tortillas
Her trauma
encased inside a bowl of frijoles
warm and familiar to the touch
Her fears
inside a glass container
taste like queso fresco
salted with tears,
and fragile.
Searing my tongue
the taste of café
dark and bitter
like swallowed betrayal
My siblings watch as I eat
and steal small bites from my food,
their own fury and pain reeking beside me.
My love,
This, too, has become a ritual
All four of us sitting junto al comal
eating our pain and swallowing our trauma
Like you and me, touching each other’s feet in bed
Or you and your lover, dancing to your humming lust.
Abril Quetzalli Blas is a 24-year-old woman finishing a degree in English Literature. She was born in Oaxaca, México, to a Zapotec family that slowly lost the knowledge to speak Zapotec and was made to believe being indigenous was a shameful secret that needed to be hidden, even though her grandparents talked to each other in Zapotec whenever they didn’t want the rest of the family to know what they were saying. She lives with her two cats. Most of the poems she writes are about her family because they are such an important part of her life.