Forever travelling breathless up Anne Muccino
From the novel Red Bricks, a Rocket Science Press new fiction release scheduled for Fall 2018
Dalia was born in the brumal season in the time of the otter when the ground breathed snow and ice and earth’s awakening was not yet contemplated by the dormant clay, and what saved me in that difficult breaching was the power of my water totem. So my abuelita says. For it is she who examined the placenta then washed the umbilical cord and buried it in the fields, not in the corner of the house Photo by Dan Coffey where the feet of women are rooted. Like Moses who struck the rock twice, she doubted the strength of my place in this world and sought to lift it where rain reaches and my totem can breathe. It is from this, my mother says, my rebellion comes. It is why in my younger years she found me in the night standing outside the house in the nakedness of a storm, drinking its music. And like Moses, my grandmother was punished for her sins by not living long enough to see the fruits of her labor ripen. There is no going back and undoing what is stone, and I thank her every day. I have lived in Las Cruces, New Mexico for as long as I can remember, and longer even before that. My dreams take me to these same streets, this same place, but in these dreams I am dressed in pants with a vaquero’s hat that sits worn on my head and my name is Lucas. I am not so tall, but taller than most, and the dream ends the same each time in the streets of Las Cruces where I am shot dead with a bullet to the heart and then I have no further memories of that life. But I do not expect to, because I am dead.
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Lost Lake Folk Opera 15
