The Water Wears My Mask

by camila hernández

my race began as the waterfall began –
a state of continuous collapse

still governs its myths, its seven stars,
unfixed or caught
at the sun’s searing edge.

a language of reach and reception wastes away
at the gorge with the tired elegance
of its spineless form. my people have receded
into its rocky graves – the pelting, clenched hush
that travels like a timeless sublime through
the body of the stream, crossing its lace legs
in a tangle of rain-cradling mouths
and mossy tongues.

from our backs, they came
to peel the flaking embers of charred skin
which cover our banks – to disassemble the muscles
in atrophy, in the untouched dunes of scattering
black earth, churned into altars –
so the waves could carve the rock and pray
as it buds, persists, and breathes

in the smoke
which now chokes the kneeling weeds –
these grasses bend with recycled aches, the sting
of loss in the torrents’ saliva, clouding
downstream in its grey-grit
underbelly – the snow clippings
of pre-stained foam now only
dust – the steepest of the landscape’s
blistered fences.

my race urges
me to wrap myself in its flames
and dissolve –
to ward off the debris of its history, yet
a burning

equal to the shrills of a turpial
senses only a flayed stomach swollen
to the brink of evaporation, lodged
between sun-baked boulders asking me

to cross –

with eyes that store all the evidence,
upward glances linger for too long,
the throat is thin-rooted – here
is where i shall be released, here

is where i will digest my way up
past the world’s ear
from the tallest hum
that wrinkles the sky.

my race began as the waterfall began –
and the bottom turns
out to be a fall – an endless
opening out,

of
a
buried
life