Status Updates From Eat the Mouth That Feeds You

“I decide to get up, out of my body. I know there are things that need doing. I can’t just go away, not yet. I leave my body there are on the ground to go and find out what there is to be done.”

“Some mothers are as transparent as curtains held up against the light. Their purpose is to shield or frame another scene with their bodies. ‘Out there, my daughters,’ they seem to say. ‘Out there is a place to go, behold the unknown. What is a mother if not a frame to show you what you may become or what you must avoid.’”

“It’s hard to see the mothers behind their veils. They are shielded, hidden, silenced by the fathers whose voices echo in all the throats, choke up the hallways of the house with their reverberations, so that even when they are not there, even in their absence, the walls are like an extension of their tyrannical bodies.”

Ini y Fati - story about a child who is struck by lightning and saved by a ghost, a child martyr who was murdered by her father and memorialized as a glass doll in a Catholic Church.

About mothers, daughters, the inescapable violence/looming threat of fathers

“In my heart, I prayed. Over and over, I whispered to him, like a little song: not here, not this place. Not like your father, not this life.”

I turned away, walking back to the bus stop. I could hear her sobs for a long time as they continued to echo in my mind. I listened as they finally dissolved, joining the lament of a police siren on its slow persistent way through the emptying streets. And then came the voice of Lola Beltran, one of her weeping songs floating from the window of a passing car, calling down the summer rain from the darkness of the sky.

“Every once in a while, the little pill failed some ill fated young man, who plummeted to the ground like a shot pigeon, splattering the concrete with drops of deep red blood. Ephemeral rubies, that transformed into brown stains, lost among ancient gum, drunkards’ dried vomit, and spilled Coca Cola.”

“A raised, sharpie black eyebrow; a hand uncurling fingers like the frond of a fern. I moved toward her and hugged her. She was still seated in her lawn chair. I felt her long braid against my cheek, the cool stickiness of her cleavage. Her hair smelled like almonds and vanilla and cigarettes. ‘Samira,’ I said, ‘I need to be left alone.’”

“When I look at her, I can see my mother moon walking in place inside her own personal tunnel, going nowhere. Suspecting the edge and the unknown beyond, she will never arrive, and I realize, I’m all on my own to figure things out. I got to keep going.”