Come upon a meeting of children under the bright hood
of raining ash and they are all white. Two redheads, two blondes,
and finally, the one with the nose like Dad and his brothers.
It’s Halloween and the field mice have been drowning
in the jacuzzi but the children still want costumes
to not be themselves moving muddy through the dusty eruption
of some giant, calcified gourd. Papa’s house burns alive
and his tears are one hundred boxes of oranges picked. The cienero’s
cries are silent. In the husked house was the mummified body of a cat
mounted and framed hanging next to the photos of Cesar Chavez and the Rivera
prints and now they are all soot and soil and no one makes jokes
about the blooming vitiligo on Papa’s hands anymore.
The children go back to school and are told to make art with
charcoal and water, and a man named Hope is charged with arson.
At Christmas, tamale-making is a learned memory, a validation
that maybe that corpsed cat is still somehow there, baked into the land.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 4.
Kate Garcia is a poet living in Southern California. She received her MFA from the University of Montana in 2022. She is a quilter, bartender, and dog mom. You can find her poems in Gulf Coast Journal, The Florida Review, Fugue, and elsewhere.
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