by Mike Soto
Consuelo’s Shawl
The shawl Consuelo lost
was turquoise, green if gray
was caught dreaming.
Heirloom knitted
by the spidery hands
of her grandmother,
let go of by degrees
as Consuelo memorized
the lives of the saints.
When marks charting
her progress covered the wall,
her abuela wiped it clean,
sat Consuelo down, & taught
her the pattern so she could
finish the final portion.
From then on that shawl
was a shield she could always
wrap around her head.
The Invention or, Consuelo’s Explanation of the Third Eye
A man swallows a mirror & thinks death is certain,
but it isn’t. The mirror goes on reflecting until it becomes
a satellite of sorts, relaying images to a screen sitting secret-
ly in the caves of his mind: internal organs blowing like
pipes in mud, the curtains of his blood, flowing—even the
tremors of his hunger are visible.
He imagines a life tormented by insight, the mirror’s
edges sharp against his bowels, but the pain shrinks to
a mere discomfort, & after years he even grows creative
with the mirror, & learns to see a furniture of disharmony
thought to have no apparent form: a pendulum rigged
against its own gravity, a tennis match at the heart of a
labyrinth generating its branches.
Once in a while, the mirror is stunned into bright-
ness, but he never recovers from the glare in time to find
the initial light. He thinks telling this story will make him
famous, but not even his closest friends are impressed.
Finally, he gives up the idea of ever getting it out
& resolves to use the mirror to some unseen advantage,
thinks maybe he’s swallowed a system for grounding the
illusions of his mind.
Dressing up a Drug Lord
To wake & wind up standing
in the same room, hands held together
formed a locket for his picture,
side by side facing the corpse
that loomed, washed & famous,
on the table. To know,
by the pair of coins & the pile
of marigolds, the Sunday clothes
& comb glowing atop the orange tin,
we were locked in with an obvious order.
Cornucopia in a coffin: garlands,
lacquered crosses, the spur-blade
of a rooster, pomegranates still ripening,
bottles of añejo—the ecstatic kind.
Everything needed to improvise
Consuelo’s first time & mine: sheers
& shapers, shadow-kits & tweezers,
beetle-theatres of jewelry.
Many would say, too young,
but we knew sand as the sound
of trying to feed a dead man’s arms
to his sleeves, so we used the scissors
to bottom out his clothes.
Consuelo wrapped the tie around
her neck first, imagined his preference.
I walked every button
thru its eyelet, like a waiter
carrying a platter up
to the last flight, where we closed
the wings of his collar & served
the freshly minted knot
to his Adam’s apple.
By then we knew: laying one coin
heads & the other tails on the scales
of his eyelids would keep them bribed,
thru the darkness, between the thighs
of Death forever watching
supper arrive on her table.
Hundreds of hired mourners outside, restless
trombones & shovels, pallbearers pacing,
& what must be his widow beside
the flügelhorns. Mother with her granddaughters
probably, tired of the sun—ex-lovers
in their blacks.
Flowers tucked like dawn around
his shoulders, lapis rosary lighting
the fingers of his left hand, & cradled under
his right arm—gold-plated cuerno de chivo.
Only then did we feel bold enough
to knock from the inside out & lie:
we were happy with our work
& yes we were done.
Paloma Negra
Those eyes the color black if it bled
were on us. I could feel the negative
star of her stare from the corner table
where she sat by herself in an aura
of dense gloom. Consuelo locked
eyes with her over my shoulder,
wondered aloud if she was ever
going to leave us alone. Bitter pull,
bitter tide—we resolved to ignore her.
To my astonishment she fired at me
while my back was turned. The bullet
exited thru my stomach, stained my
hand when I tried to catch the pain.
My own blood made the handle too
slippery when I reached for revenge.
When I managed to turn around Consuelo
was nowhere to be found. I had the entire
room to myself. The silence was alive
& emptiness roared. Dimming fast as I
made my way to the door, I walked out
to the astonished crowd in the street,
managed to catch that woman grinning
into the passenger seat of a Grand Marquis
with a charm of crow feathers glimmering
from the rearview mirror & what had
to be Consuelo at the wheel.
Square inside a Circle
Ages ago, this ring
was a ring for bulls,
built with stone, brought
in wheelbarrows,
by minds who thought
Sumidero would always
be a family town, not a city
engulfed in violence:
3,766 murders this year
not counting the unfound,
missing, or disappeared.
Today a much younger
crowd comes to watch
the men who bang rolls
of money out of their
shirt pockets, place
bets on the grass.
Sometimes while getting
the spur-blade tied to the back
of its leg, a gallo will mistake
dusk for dawn & let out a crow
in the middle of the commotion.
People scream: Ya ven! Órale
cabrones, aflojen el dinero!
Golden arms, boots of exotic
leather, several which point
like prows of ships.
When they square off
the roosters like two
sparks trying to get out
of the same box.
Death the Greedy Politician
They said it couldn’t be done, but I
tunneled a path between a toolshed
& the private residence of his golf resort,
made my way clean thru the manicured
hills in the dark, came to the rectangular
glow of his swimming pool, said a brief
prayer as I stood at the edge of the emerald
water. Thru the glass doors I could
see him at his leisure—on the couch,
belly out, drink in hand, television screen
bathing him on & off in swaths of light.
The volume turned up loud enough, I
opened the doors unnoticed, & before
he knew it, the corner of his eye was mine,
I made a few greasy lifetimes flash before
With my pistol I motioned for him to
get dressed, get ready. When I walked
him thru the brightness of his front door
it was dawn, a crowd had assembled on
the grass, & one of his minions emerged
with his gun on an embroidered pillow
as usual. I stared him down, felt the live-
wire confidence, felt keen & done with
thinking it thru. When I turned my back
to walk the proper distance, I felt him
take the bait, dropped to a knee,
hooked my pistol under my left arm,
& fired. I took his shoulder off.
He couldn’t raise his arm. Everyone
jeered & thought it was over, but it
wasn’t. He ordered one his minions
to shoot me. He refused. He ordered
another—he didn’t budge. I stepped
toward him, shot the wig off of his head
like you might blow out a candle—
indiscreetly & without thinking twice.
When he started running, I put a shot
in his culo. Even though it was a crisp
morning I clocked his humiliation along
with his astonishment at high noon.
I told him to stand up, I made him strip.
I shot his manhood off to make the
cipher complete. I knew it would
make sense once I did it, but not
what kind of sense. The silence
was alive as it’s ever been. When
the only clouds left in the sky
merged with an enormous implied
shattering—& for so many days after—
I found myself trapped in a tower
I eventually climbed out of only
to find myself trapped even further
by the desert in every direction.
The Useful Rituals
Before, in sleep, we’ve put our hands
together & called a distant warmth
to come halo our feet when the sheets
have been thrown from our bodies,
summoned that sensation to rise from
our toes to hover above our heads
like a hummingbird. And when we
wake up our hair is perfectly combed
& parted, steaming as if our dreams
had us working in the cold. And because
we’ve slept the entire day in order
to be awake the entire night,
we enter the cemetery with the sun
gone down, gather our first thoughts
with a cup of black as the first wreaths
arrive. Two men each carry the golden
weight of flowers caked so densely
to the door-like frames. And since
there’s always some pendejo trying
to do it all by himself, we lend our
shoulders & learn two versions
of the cross sit on top of each other
because the useful rituals survive,
learn moths flicker above the graves
because the men decorating the entrance
with marigolds have decided for the third
time the arch needs more. When it’s night
enough the ether that dances above
the flames can be seen. Some may never
notice, or it might come to them all at once,
when enough families trickle in, start dressing
the tombs of loved ones—the labyrinth
everyone must walk to avoid stepping on
the graves of others. A mother hands a spade
to her daughter, straightens the picture
of her husband after kissing it several times.
There is a feeling to take away when the cemetery
is lit up like this, hands shaking like cities
in our pockets because it’s gotten cold—remember
completely enough, notice the seeds already
held in your fists, the ones that will lift our lives
above the ground just the inch we need.
Untitled (Tunnel with Horse & Rider)
That night told my life, be a tunnel, connect
the gold-green wind to the breath you’ll use
to clear the dust caked on Malverde’s shrine.
To reach the unlit side of my life I became
a prodigy, suffering to wake from a dream
twice the size of my sleep even then, when
people said a curse, a weight that doubled
at night, that Death disguised as dreaming,
sat on my chest while I slept. But I only felt
misunderstood. When I overheard a rumor
the first ever shrine to Malverde lay hidden
in plain sight in a used car lot somewhere
in Sumidero, I took it as a life & death matter
to see the unseen. After years of wandering
lots of old Beetles, Buick LeSabres, luxury
Broncos, getting kicked out of dealerships
for being bearded & weird. After leaping
waves of barbwire on walls at night,
a dash covered in banana leaves called
to me by name. I opened the door
to a late-model Astro hollowed out
to house the stones that first made
his grave. Above them, a cornucopia
slept around the vague bust of Malverde.
Finally, with my chance, I took the deepest
breath I owned, blew the veil from his face—
& when I placed my hat on his head,
the trembling I carried for years inside me
paused like a deer from drinking water;
& in the nondistance between us, awoke
a neon quiet where I dumped all the marigolds
of all the cemeteries I’ve seen, lit the candles
I didn’t bring, & poured him the añejo
I could never afford. A space where I could
sign my name with my knees & ask for help.
I knew the next phase of my life would need
a different tunnel: one that connected
my ignorance to an isthmus where I am
a rider letting his horse graze the grass.
Topito’s Poise
To mute the blood, enter the room
with the neon labyrinth, to lay
my weapon down by its entrance,
walk the spiraled path
as a string of silver memories
gets brighter in my mind:
my grandfather braiding a sling,
my grandmother tearing tortillas
into a bowl of milk, & the cats
coming out of nowhere …
To stand over the trapdoor
at the heart of the labyrinth,
open it, & find a second spiral
in the stairwell.
To set foot on a ground
teeming with light, pull out
the .38 hidden in my jacket,
cock the hammer back,
& approach deliberately.
To sense the crow perched
on the table understands
why I’ve come. And when
it flies into the darkness of
an empty doorway, a man
in a snakeskin vest emerges,
& when he asks why the hat
he gave me isn’t on my head,
that space wobbles like a red
comb on a black rooster, &
when I tell him I placed it on
Malverde’s head, his smile is
all silver, his hand holds out
a lizard that has shed its tail.
Consuelo in the Poppy Fields
Sparked on the steep terrain of a town just west of
Sumidero—fields of poppies where lentils once thrived.
Some still remember the black smoke, how quickly after
the men with torches in their hands & bandanas over their
noses left, the ultraviolet flowers blanketed the hillsides.
The most lucrative drug market the world has ever
known raged into existence just north of the border. The
cartels responded to the soaring demand with exponential
growth. One field became seven. Experienced workers be-
came supervisors, putting the word out, posting flyers for
people built low to the ground. Teenagers poised enough
to come on as security transformed the fortune of their
families instantly after generations of humble earnings. The
vow never to return to a life of having nothing always a
live wire.
During collecting season, a full moon on a clear night
might bathe the fields in the pull of a light that makes
milk from the scored pods come. Consuelo grew up here,
claims on such occasions hummingbirds of a nocturnal
breed arrive & become ecstatic from sucking on the pods
left oozing, slow down from their hyperawareness to perch
on the rocks in their delirium. The iridescence of their
feathers a green rarely seen.
A Few Visions (Topito’s List)
Sometimes there is a table at
the heart of a labyrinth, with
a cross made from kernels of
maize beneath it, & a supper I
must get to before it gets cold.
Other times, the heart holds
a chair caught in a dream-fire,
& the labyrinth is lit up like
a circuit. A path so obvious
it tames me to a core of
forward motion.
To sit down willingly, learn
to breathe, thru the rising
flames see the ship that sits
under the stars like a mountain
waiting to be unmoored,
to grasp the poise of dragonflies,
hummingbirds, deer—all creatures
whose complete stillness is ecstatic.
To know the day after death I’ll
walk thru an empty doorway,
find myself in a field of moonlit
grass, I’ll roam a black & white
world where intuition sees more
than sight & sight is not susceptible
to all the pretty lies. The day after
death I’ll find Consuelo on the tips
of her toes, trying to glimpse into
a flickering window. Even now
I’m dying to cradle her foot
in my hand & buy her a look.
Malverde Chapel or, Consuelo’s Revenge