Natalia Martinez
Natalia Martinez, originally from El Paso, TX, is a creative writing MFA student at Florida International University. Her writing has been featured in Laurus, Bellingham Review, and is forthcoming in Mid-American Review and Ninth Letter. She has received recognition from the AWP Intro Journals Award, Florida International University, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She now resides in Miami, Florida by way of the Great Plains.
Elegy For My Grandmother and The Other Dead & Buried Norteñas
She was born from the mountain. No, she was born into my little bird arms, born from my pescuezo, & I, hers. When it snowed in the desert, she would mix clean ice from the top of a car with milk-sugar, stir in the canelo. We drank the snow in big gulps. Such was our longing, for that rare gift, for a cold sweet thing. When it was hot, she hung clothes on a copper wire. She never let a man hit her twice. Instead, she called the police, and the police tried to deport her. Her husband shot bullets into her house, leaving holes for small birds to nest in. When she swallowed the first stone, she told no one, then swallowed another. Her husband was shot, not killed. She beat his other woman at the hospital near El Centro, bashed her other-woman-skull into the sink as her husband lay there, bleeding. That’s the thing about spilled milk, about swallowing. I watched her die. No, she was found dead. They buried her in the mountains. They buried her on Montana Avenue, near the Walmart. They buried her, like a fallen bird, in the creosote tree, which is to say, they didn’t bury her at all.
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Image by Europeana from Unsplash
Helmi Herman, Estonian e-Repository and Conservation of Collections Providing Country: Estonia CC0 Naine by Herman, Helmi (autor) - Tartu Art Museum, Estonia - CC0.
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