oh heavenly Ek Chuaj[i],
the earth aches for your feet
the ground, riving at our every footprint, shuns us
spits back our steps like watermelon seeds
the land flinches when we walk worried we will weigh of wounds, woefully
i feel for her pulse, cup my hands, incise these
fingers autopsy-like
unsure if i am more \ clamshell / or / reseeding \ or
if i am just etching playing in the soil
burrowing graves for my rupturing fragments to dwell, my plucked breaths, my
skin excoriating itself, unlatching free, unraveling loose like an old cast
beloved Ek Chuaj[ii],
give me the heart of ancient traveling tradesmen
& the memory that hustlin’ has always been holy like us[iii],
bearing offerings of our ephemeral existence daily
drifting sacrificially migrants despite the precarity
despite the bigots and nationalists
despite the thieves who chew at our names and history[iv] their way into our pockets and
debate whether the Belgians make the best chocolate, or the Swiss, or the Germans
¿& what jingles are sung of the cacao bean? – only our names[v]
which often fit me like a wrapper, neatly folded with a tantalizing shine
today, mine[vi] tastes more of the processed contents
flesh[vii] betrayed by the recipe
recollecting what it might have meant to be raw cacahuatl[viii]
hanging on an evergreen tree in Santiago Nonualco[ix]
like a child untroubled by the dirt below,
its appetites and insatiable rumbles
the future often instills a rotten
feeling before the
pod is even macheted open,
instincting omens of dissolving at their words
melting in their mouths
sometimes in their hands; Lord, those hands…
Ek Chuaj, have mercy on those blaspheming hands,
deporting[x] your kin in mass
they want us gone, Ek Chuaj
se empacharon, Ek Chuaj
como siempre, socorrenos[xi], Ek Chuaj
________________________________________________________________________
[i] God of cacao
intimate knower of how branches can synchronically serenade the heavens and soliloquize self-love
versed in these songs that tamed time to tick through claves
[ii] God of pilgrimaging merchants,
also the ones suspended in stillness, soldierin’ the corners
calibrated only by unfamiliar ghosts
ever-pendulating between harvesting and rotting
[iii] the day I learned how to tell time using the length of songs on the radio I realized I was not actually 17 years old: I was 12 baktun, 19 katun, 14 tun, 16 uinal, 1 k’in
[iv] if you papercut a crevice of your toe enough times
it, too, can infect without proper attention
and make the country beneath you a neverending source of pain
[v] naming as a coping mechanism for coloniality
syllables remixed to alterego our praying altars;
these many names always translate the same though:
geneses, ineffable, archived amnesia...
[vi] the r rolls
itself like a scroll unfurling only to unveil the secrets
half burnt from the pseudoart of lighting one flame from another:
Bishop Diego de Landa’s fire has made a moth of me
[vii] flesh that gluts desert plates
flavors tongues of a sun-drenched crop
-ped self-portrait, more palatable sweet or bitter
depending on the caña, the machete,
and the fleshy things
stomaching us
[viii] gift from the sacred mountains
a bouquet that stretched for miles, professing the gods’ love;
or maybe it was a bribe preemptively paid to cross prophesized borders &
live forever worshipped on our tongues, even if it is as “chocolate”
[ix] where we learned to make shakers out of hourglasses make dying musical
1833, in a rebellion against the landowners the leader was beheaded and displayed as a warning
I carry this violence
like an epigraph
everywhere I go
[x] we who have been scarred by lineages of missionaries
do not understand this languaged borders in the same way;
we have come to distinguish between demarcated prison walls and the loving arms of a home
based not on the ambiguity of coordinate points
but whether the territory speaks to our soles more in eulogies or prayers
[xi] “que Dios nos socorra” is my mother’s ritualized oratory
an unbombed hogar I, too, seek refuge in
whenever my body-temple flounders to stay relevant
in the offshore shallowed annals of time
[i] God of cacao
intimate knower of how branches can synchronically serenade the heavens and soliloquize self-love
versed in these songs that tamed time to tick through claves
[ii] God of pilgrimaging merchants,
also the ones suspended in stillness, soldierin’ the corners
calibrated only by unfamiliar ghosts
ever-pendulating between harvesting and rotting
[iii] the day I learned how to tell time using the length of songs on the radio I realized I was not actually 17 years old: I was 12 baktun, 19 katun, 14 tun, 16 uinal, 1 k’in
[iv] if you papercut a crevice of your toe enough times
it, too, can infect without proper attention
and make the country beneath you a neverending source of pain
[v] naming as a coping mechanism for coloniality
syllables remixed to alterego our praying altars;
these many names always translate the same though:
geneses, ineffable, archived amnesia...
[vi] the r rolls
itself like a scroll unfurling only to unveil the secrets
half burnt from the pseudoart of lighting one flame from another:
Bishop Diego de Landa’s fire has made a moth of me
[vii] flesh that gluts desert plates
flavors tongues of a sun-drenched crop
-ped self-portrait, more palatable sweet or bitter
depending on the caña, the machete,
and the fleshy things
stomaching us
[viii] gift from the sacred mountains
a bouquet that stretched for miles, professing the gods’ love;
or maybe it was a bribe preemptively paid to cross prophesized borders &
live forever worshipped on our tongues, even if it is as “chocolate”
[ix] where we learned to make shakers out of hourglasses make dying musical
1833, in a rebellion against the landowners the leader was beheaded and displayed as a warning
I carry this violence
like an epigraph
everywhere I go
[x] we who have been scarred by lineages of missionaries
do not understand this languaged borders in the same way;
we have come to distinguish between demarcated prison walls and the loving arms of a home
based not on the ambiguity of coordinate points
but whether the territory speaks to our soles more in eulogies or prayers
[xi] “que Dios nos socorra” is my mother’s ritualized oratory
an unbombed hogar I, too, seek refuge in
whenever my body-temple flounders to stay relevant
in the offshore shallowed annals of time
Javier Perez is a Salvadoran-American poet, teaching artist, and M.A. student at the University of Cape Town. He is co-founder of Swarthmore College’s spoken-word collective OASIS (Our Art Spoken in Soul), project manager of the Cape Town-based collective, Lingua Franca Spoken Word Movement, and co-founder and Executive Director of the CYPHER (Cape Youth Poetry Hub for Expression & Rhythm). Javier's work appears in Acentos Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Apricity Press, and many more. Javier's manuscript was selected as a finalist for the Center for the Book Arts' 2017 Chapbook Program and he is the recipient of the Thomas J Watson Fellowship (2013-14), Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (2012-13), and Roosevelt Institute Fellowship (2013).