Madre
“Oh dark mother, wound me
with ten knives to the heart”
P. Neruda
I
Mother: have you heard your voice the last few years?
Do you know what you’ve lost?
your name
your age
and your dreams?
They swapped your eyes for darts
your fingers for worms
and your feet for pegs.
I call you mother because I don’t have any other name for you.
I can’t call you woman or elder or monster.
The coffee spills in the kitchen
and you’ve fallen asleep in front of the TV.
Centuries have passed and your bones still inhabit the living room,
earth in your mouth, poison in your eyelids.
Mother, where did you stash the insomnia pills?
These days I need to
sew my eyes shut and wait for death.
II
My mother is a fish without pond or ocean,
ashen eyes in a room of my memory.
She dreamed of giving birth to many men
who bent their knees
and adored her womb.
My mother murdered her children.
And she stuck a needle for each one:
Her lineage was so great
that she was no longer a woman but steel
and between flesh and blood
she became a thorn.
My mother dumped her empire of crosses onto my skirt
She grabbed hold of the children I’ve yet to have
and passed on her venom because she hates rats.
III
Mother, sing me a lullaby
that can fit the entire world
and a face where the mirrors burn,
sing of nights without dawn that separate
me from the faith of burying my hands in the stars
Weave me a shroud for a dress
Tie braids around my neck
and strap me to the rafters,
rock me, I will be your pendulum
a plump doll swinging amid the furniture.
IV
Mother, I forgot to tell you that no one has a mother.
A woman
How many times we fled from the world,
How long they burned our hands:
Long we served the office
of giving birth, cooking dinner, raising beasts.
They relegated us to be trophies,
in the halls of important men.
We bit our tongues in the face of insults,
we stayed our fists, before the blow.
We resigned ourselves to cleaning the lowest of shelves,
And sucked up their malice in tears.
They gnawed on our bodies,
they left us naked,
in garbage cans, sidewalks and sugar cane fields.
We all were raped.
By the father, by the son, by the sons of their sons.
And no one said a damn thing.
In the depths of silence,
we mended our wounds.
Our heart was a suture
that always ripped open,
again and again.
In the darkest of nights they would burn our wings.
We collected herbs, brewed concoctions,
to heal those who would betray us.
They found us performing our love in the fire,
we raised our voices and they thought us crazy
and burned us as witches and deviants at the stake.
It was all the men, legitimate sons of God.
Ashes upon ashes,
we were one with the breath of the wind.
They erased our names from encyclopedias
they ignored our footsteps in newspapers
they kept our remains in wide cemeteries
where there never was a grave,
a name,
a woman.
Ana María Rivas (b. 1995, Santa Tecla, El Salvador) was part of the defunct Escuela de Jóvenes Talentos en Letras sponsored by the Universidad Dr. José Matías Delgado. In more recent years, she has been a member of the Taller Literario Altazor and other poetry workshops. She received first prize in poetry (2016) in La Flauta de los pétalos, a contest of women’s literature at University of El Salvador and the Center for Gender Studies. Her prose appears in the literary compilation Sextante, and her poems have been published in the youth anthology Torre de Babel vol. XV, the Salvadoran women poets anthology Las muchachas de la última fila, the magazine Cultura N°121, among other digital magazines. She holds a degree in Plastic Arts from the University of El Salvador.
Nestor Gómez is a cadejo and translator of Salvadoran poetry. He is an MFA graduate of Saint Mary’s College of California and a PhD graduate of the University of Illinois Chicago.
