Q.E.P.D..
when the
half mexican in me dies, and you’re killing it right now,
the first
thing to change is that juan gabriel and marco antonio solis
will no longer make me cry i’ll stop
throwing sazon in your eyes i’ll soon
leave my dark hair, my hair dark let it
clog the shower drain
i won’t tell you i’m sorry i’ll never scrub pee off a toilet bowl that
is not mine, again that was my mother’s
job not with my knees pressed to the
muck on the tile te digo yo not mine and i’ll never wash your dishes
soon enough i’ll forget to call her, my mother she’ll call every day once she worries i’m
dead, but i won’t
respond because i’ll forget my name is itzel it’ll now be something easy, sweet, simple,
like susan or ashley
but for now, i am
still itzel, and i am forgetting the hail mary and our father forgetting to mistrust a drunk,
older
man my r’s stopped rolling they sit there, going dry, like they’ve
forgotten how to dance i think by
now
you no longer want to watch.
and when you’ve really killed me, i’ll
forget how much i loved watching my grandmother make tortillas. how i
waited to
eat the first one, right off el comal.
BIO
Itzel Basualdo is an interdisciplinary artist from Miami, Florida. She hated the place for many years, but now misses it terribly because she lives in Chicago. Her practice often involves photography, video, installation, text, sometimes all at the same time. Her work has appeared in The MFA Years, Sinking City Lit Mag, Creative Nonfiction, Saw Palm Magazine, and the documents folder on her laptop. Born to a Mexican mother and Argentinean father, Itzel is currently writing about what her heritage holds in a chapbook titled "La concha de tu madre." She is a MFA Candidate in Writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.