My love and I are being evicted from our house. No one wants us here anymore. My love has blue roses that sprout from his hand, and they have planted themselves here in the winter on this planet. Our brown skin has learned to sustain itself here. This planet has never seen hand bones so capable of loving. Our skin has grown accustomed to the cold. When we were children, our mothers told us that Moctezuma sent his warriors up into the mountains to collect crushed ice for him. He would drench the ice in the nectar of fruit, blood warm from the sun. The sun we have never seen before.
My love knits me blankets out of red yarn, and they always feel itchy on my arms and legs. I don't tell him this; instead, I lay the blanket over our bed, waiting for him to climb over brass knuckles and return home to me.
Tomorrow, I'll take our bed apart like it is built of bird bones, put it in my sac, and carry it over my shoulder. If I wish too hard, the birds will freeze and won't reawaken until more of our people come to this house and knife them back to life.
Tomorrow, I'll pull all of the roses from the garden until their petal heads fall off and freeze, and they'll make a trail of dirt behind us, my yellow gown flapping in the haze, and my black-eyed love will never look back, his hair slick with charcoal and rain from my mouth. We won't remember this little house we left behind, only the lights that combust over our skin again and again, making our children and stars in this cold cold fire.
Monique Quintana is a Xicana from Fresno, CA, and is the author of Cenote City (Clash Books, 2019). Her work has also been supported by Yaddo, The Sundress Academy for the Arts, The Community of Writers, and The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. You can find her at moniquequintana.com and @quintanagothic
'Moctezuma' was first published in the January 2018 issue of Dream Pop Press.
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