BIO
Gustavo Hernandez is a poet from Jalisco, Mexico. He was raised in Santa Ana, California. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Sonora Review, Reed, Assaracus, Word Riot, and others.
Baudelia
Grand
mal seizures. My guess at the force
that
was my Tía Baudelia’s burden. All
these
decades later, from the stories
that
my mother tells me. All her life
in
Jalisco, at the foot of a plateau, some
wilderness,
in the disadvantage of an era,
to
us, now, the disadvantage of old time,
in
an adobe house, in the mist. El gran mal.
When
my grandmother died, her daughters
thought
they saw the source of her cancer
take
the shape of an owl and fly into
the
dry moonlit ruffle of a guamúchil.
In
town, depressed women were explained
with
poison fed to them in food flavored
with
envy or by the hands of jilted lovers.
But
Baudelia was different—what ill will
could
befall someone who lived clutching
her
mother’s rebozo her entire life? A sickness.
A
sadness. Poor child. Poor girl. Poor woman.
I
guess at her half-living in a stasis, paint joy in
the
warm dirt patios of spring, her ear to a rustle
and
glint of a finch song in the poinsettia,
the
warmth of the stone oven in her parents’
kitchen,
the blossoms of her sisters’ fortunes.
My
mother says when I was born she asked
to
hold me. That I felt her arms outstretching.
Her
breath expanding. Give him to me, Lupe.
I
can hold him. I won’t drop him. I won’t get sick.