Michelle’s Bio:

Michelle Martinez is currently a librarian at Sam Houston State University. She lives with her cat but isn’t a crazy cat-lady, merely crazy. Her dachshund is currently being hostage by her parents. Writing is her passion and her future, and so is her mafia-looking boyfriend in New Jersey.

Unbuckling Orion’s Belt

By Michelle Martinez

 

Abeula says the stars are moth holes in night’s black curtain through which the Queen of Heaven peers.

I leave my broken sandals by the back door. The odour of a young wife’s burnt tortillas lingers in the air and my stomach rumbles. The sharp-pebbled path is gritty and warm like Papá’s sunburnt neck, stained the shade of tamarillos—picked and made into wine already so late in this season. I’m cloaked in evening’s shadows of tin-roofed homes mushrooming off the mountain’s side. All the wild beasts are gone. In this dark, the houses form a haphazard castle with toothed turrets and uneven curtain walls.

Tugging the folds of my only dress, pleating my hair, polishing my face with rough sands, the wind fusses. From between Andean teeth, this witch’s breath is your skirling beckon—an unsteady tune as if a shepherd inexpertly plays his new-carved flute.

How many suns and moons, pushed by giants, roll across the sky until I reach you?

My raw soles rouge this familiar earth—a trail for Papá.

I feel the Virgin’s cold eye upon my face. The rainforest’s cooling sweat pricks my skin like a scorpion’s sudden sting.

In your mother’s village, the women, flat-chested and proud, eye me with a jaguar’s suspicion. They prepare for trouble that stalks my tracks. The men are painted yellow and green like the toucans high in the heaven-supporting kapok’s branches. They are just as suspicious of you—so unlike them with your hunting ways—with the prey you lure so closely, threatening the village borders.

Your voice reaches me through the vine-strangled trees. Fireflies pulse slow and golden among Papá’s unripe orchard where his men pluck the tamarillo fruit.

Drunk from the tamarillo wine I snuck from Abuela’s cupboard, we tumble to the grass. Arms, hands, legs, feet, we’re twisted into a single vine. I smell the moon in your hair and the night breeze of fading leaves and distant planets clinging under your arms. Your nails have bits of sky caught beneath.

Leave your impressions on me—the shape of your body against mine—as though I’m a doll of beeswax.

You say, “Come back with me, come with me into the sky.”

What would I eat? What would I drink?

“There are great fish I could catch for you. I can wring water from the clouds.”

And who will help Abuela pick cherimoyas for her pies? Who will water the roses on Mamí’s grave and comb the burs from her Shih Tzu’s white and grey hairs?

Sunrise, blushing, may find me naked still, soil-dusted, smelling of wine and stars. If it rains tomorrow, the Virgin saw us and weeps.

***