Beside the gulch, beneath a willow,
there was a girl who chipped her tooth into a boy’s mouth as they kissed.
She never got that sliver back.
My legs grew every night, keeping me awake.
In summer, the sky split with lightning and it cost our peach tree its largest limb.
Even then, I knew I had debts
that were not being written down.
After the storm, the gutters swallowed and swallowed.
Inside the brittle huddle of whiteness, I was suckled, washed, blessed.
Even further inside it,
our names were taken.
We were paid handsomely.
After my legs ceased lengthening, I came to understand this.
I purchased the vocabulary of supremacy.
Someone pointed to the constellation of theft, visible from where they sat beside me,
and I saw.
I chipped my tooth in solidarity with the girl by the gulch, after she asked me not to.
Like my mother, but for reasons deemed more noble, I began to distrust my hunger.
I folded myself until I creased, and still, no one was more free.
Another white woman said, It’s hard to even look at, nodding to the bald slope on the mountain.
She meant the loss of all those trees to logging.
I felt the same, but didn’t say it, avoiding my relation to her and her minor griefs.
Instead, I wrote mine down on paper sheaf after paper sheaf.
I circled myself with the debts, planting them around me like saplings.
This repaid none of them.
I grew attached to them, gave them names.
I was so desperate to owe nothing
that I could not sense the world where owing goes extinct.
I bent down to examine a fallen cedar, searching for a pattern of rings
where I could touch the unmistakable ridge between complicity and pardon.
The center, where its origin once grew, was rotted soft—unreadable. ◆
Homepage Image: Angel Lartigue, Water, Moon, 2022. Subcutaneous injection of estrogen performed at Don Pedro Jaramillo shrine, Falfurrias TX. Photographs by Tere Garcia, from Gulf Coast Summer/Fall 2023, Issue 35.2
