When they tell me I am like you, no stronger blessing
can caress my forehead, thumb in four directions,
a million carnation petals laid at my feet.
They say our noses are the same, a crescent moon
etched between the bridge and the tip–
so resemblant of a button.
You’re moved easily to tears and your words
sometimes bite holes into fragile surfaces,
but your love wraps a tight quilt around our pain.
Your hands grasp mine tight, and you tell me you feel
your mother in my hands.
In yours, I feel sunlight
and wet soil lined with coffee grounds,
and years upon years of breathing people back to life.
Ammonia soaked the wooden floors, and you shuffled your feet
across the kitchen tile to the liveliest rancheras.
Still you dance.
Your eyes can’t contain their ecstasy, wild and tricky, enlivened
like magic. When they tell me I am like you, I imagine capturing
your magnetism by endeavoring a wink.
I’ll shut both eyes tight instead, and you’ll let out a howl of laughter in response.
To you, everything is special, and friendship comes easily.
When your light flickered, the world felt as if it belly flopped into nothing.
I hummed songs about weariness, and imagined a day where the seams
around my life were ripped hem to hem in a swift laceration.
Every time you mentioned the rancho, I imagined your tazas azules, and cowboy baths, embroideries manifested in pain.
You caught a second wind, one more precious
than a functioning sewing machine,
the fancy ones, like with the pedal.
To keep my bones solid inside me, you looked into my face,
said, You’ll be ok, mijita. I have faith.
I don’t know where it comes from, or how you went about
reading my mind from day one.
As gifts, you’d give me the alphabet–
spanish and english and stories,
spinning my mind on a pottery wheel,
constantly questioning, searching
for the lessons life has to teach me.
You always said you were a bruja,
pointer finger firm against your pursed lips.
If you can tap my brain, I’ll take solace in knowing
you’ll hover around my life in obscure intervention,
1,260 beats of a hummingbirds’ wings.
When they tell me I am like you, I imagine
all of the ways my love must take root,
entangling meaning into every soul I touch
Mercedes was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she completed her Bachelor of Arts in Chicana and Chicano Studies, concentrating in Intersectional Politics and Social Movements in May 2016. She finished her Master’s Degree in Education, concentrating in Educational Thought and Sociocultural Studies at the University of New Mexico in May 2019.
Mercedes grew up in Albuquerque’s organizing community, has worked with various nonprofits and grassroots organizations, and is devoted to affecting social change while emphasizing commitment to the arts as a mechanism in achieving it. Writing has remained an integral source of power and healing in Mercedes’s life.
Mercedes has worked as a writer for Popejoy, a performing arts venue in Albuquerque, NM, as well as supported in writing pieces for the National Institute of Flamenco. She published her thesis: “Toward a Nuevomexicana Consciousness: An Exploration of Identity through Education as Manifest through the Colonial Legacy”, through the University of New Mexico digital archives in May 2019.