Luna Madre
My turtles, my hatchlings, viscous and far-flung—who do you belong to
as you crawl dead-eyed to the waves and moon? I've traced her peyote perfume,
followed serpentine women and the silver black tendrilsof strangers
into tropical depressions that left me so torn-up and wretched,even the oysters cried as I ate them.
When my mother came to me, bloodied and glittered in sea glass,
she arrived on the backs of a thousand snow crabs, held out her hands, and asked—Do you grieve for me?
then finished her cigarette by the pool and dove into the water, leaving
only the smile of an inflatable alligator floating behind her. [End Page 37]
And there will always be this fracture of sweetness inside of my sorrow.
The last flickers I have of her are glimmers of heat lightning,summer sky soaked in dragonflies,bruised limbs hushed in the ferns. When they came for my mother,
she spat and shook dead birds, prayed to brujas and to virgins,
who appeared luminous yet exhausted,
and we stood in the grass as she was carried to the van.
Her face, a silhouette on the window, turned and whispered, Go seaward. [End Page 38]
Rachel Inez Marshall's work has appeared in the Ploughshares, The Adroit Journal, Mississippi Review, Best New Poets, Quarterly West, and The Normal School. She currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
