Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was born in Zacatecas, Mexico, and is a Canto Mundo fellow, a Zell post-graduate fellow and the first undocumented student to graduate from the University of Michigan’s MFA program. He’s a Pushcart nominee and has received fellowships to attend the Squaw Valley Writer’s Workshop, and the Vermont Studio Center. He teaches summers at the Atlantic Center for the Arts as artist in residence. His poems and essays can be found in Huizache, Indiana Review, Jubilat, New England Review, The Paris American, and Buzzfeed, among others.
ORIGIN OF GLASS by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
Sunday, 29 March 2015
it is winter again as we feel our way through a bed of glass in the river we’ve been here before everything’s the same still the morning still the pieces of glass we pile in the image of a child and praise in truth we can’t make anything happen between us winter began inside you no one knew but I knew * I want to believe this will end with the child coiled around your finger with thousands watching and throwing roses at us with lights and glitter in our hair but we both know how it ends we practice until we don’t need to tell our bodies how to do it the child with her glass head— her lips curled in my palm trying to say her name for her will you hold her to the light will you breathe a little pink into her your hands on her throat looking for the song at the other end not everything is a bright flute made of bone * we tried shaking her out of us like a bee down our shirts but what if the bee had been a wasp what if it died not because it stung but because it grew tired of stinging milk eyed small lunged prophet in the mud you wash the sand out of your hair where the mushrooms outnumber the stars we sit on the bank in the sun and quietly roll clay between our legs and its hardening is a form of meditation winter begins with her hands detached from the branches you knew you always knew
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