BIO
Leah M. Gómez was born and raised in the thirsty borderland of El Paso, Texas. She received her MFA in Poetry from University of Oregon. Her work appears in BorderSenses Literary Journal and Duende.
My mother makes salsa de arbol after she finds out about my father’s infidelity
She glides the knife
over a wet stone, once,
twice, her own pleasure.
She lifts the fresh blade
to a jalapeño’s head,
it’s green body, hot and wilted
after the boil. She slices off
the stem. Her hand steadies
a tomato, I watch as she cuts
the red bulb in half,
juice and seed splatter
all over her white cotton
apron. She takes chile
de arbol and chops
the roasted red tongues
into pieces. Blender’s blades
slay red she has made into pulp.
Silence takes the first taste
of the spicy steam that rises
from the bowl. I turn to her
and ask, “Can you teach me,
mother, how to sharpen
the knives, how to burn
the tongue?”
Of wine and bones
At our garden’s edge, between dark
wood and tangled grape vines, a widow
reaches her long black legs across the silken
palm of her web. Each limb knowing the arch
of its own part weaves together the
translucent
veined print of her home. As the sun crosses
over the firs into trellised light and
shadow,
I sit beneath the pergola, wisteria raged and
overgrown,
my distance from the widow kept by fear. I
see
the man I love stand between shadow and
sunlight,
Let’s
drink to drink and toast to our love,
he says, pours more wine into my glass.
My mind bitten by the thought of my own
death. Wounded, my mind crawls through
the woven-work of death’s possibilities:
what would I do to survive? My eyes
steady and watching him, now, I pour him
another glass, let us drink until our bodies
are woven together in the light of their own
web,
then I eat him, all flesh, down to the
bones.