Margo Tamez


Stung

The wall must be navigated nimbly. 
What can happen, what can’t,

what can’t be named, what should or should not be spoken,
accumulates in the vertical, dark spaces between pylons,

steel bars as ruminations unable to penetrate hard-panned
gray soil, draining & depopulating

time, flood plains, & hurricanes,
tumbled & shoved into a heap

removed, relocated off to the side of the wall.
A throw-away zone, not registering on Google earth.

Heap hop. Heap thought. Heap rot. Heap shot. Heap knot.
Huisache, mescal saplings & folded tooth-paste tubes

flattened by surveillance border trucks ramming aluminum,
stems, & leaves into thin, split aggregated things.

Thingified into place outside time, old & new
gnash into the crevasses of history & its borders. Tin cans with jagged edges,

their tops folded back where someone cut them open with a serrated knife,
rubber-banded plastic spoons & blue & red shot-gun shells.

Here is the space missing from history,
at the cross-roads of missing & murdered brown women

discounted by place-making levies & laced with scraps of Fanta bottles smashed
in a circular kill pattern, Gamesa wrappers & Super-Wal-Mart bags snagged on clumps

of Bermuda grass, tampons the charred color of menstruation the dog packs eat out
prying apart the fibers with their noses & claws,

hormonal musk & the minerals nourishing them.
Brownsville winter Canadian-Texans transmigrating,

living parallel lives along brown-bodied kids
north of the wall biking to schools, criss-crossing & dodging

White bodies, crushing encroachments, here, in the cracks & spaces,
between great-grandma’s refusals & grandma’s, & mom’s, & mine,

are stolen women’s duct-taped wrists & mouths. Each silenced
by un-making, paved over & enclosed

to work & back, to work & back, to work & back.
Here are the heat & muffled echoes 

enmeshed in mallows & desert poppies
growing at the river canal’s irrigated edges, their stems & shocked

crowns embossed into paper-thin duct-tape scraps
blowing around the wall on hot July nights.

Here is the back door where she clocked out & into
wall time. The Dodge Ram between midnight & the early morning.

She imagined she would arrive home then sleep the sleep of the overworked.
She imagined she’d be washing dishes left in the sink all day. She

didn’t notice the crows who scratched & wailed from the wall
who were telling the guy in the Dodge their laughter on top of the wall

is the wall cackling against the shove of the world,
& the wall had no time for predators.

The wall morphed into a warden, took him prisoner,
ate him like pie, & tossed the tin pan in the wind, 

empty of crumbs, emptied from vertical shadows
of steel posts. The wall is an eclipsed star quashing the emptiness

before time & emptiness collide & fuse
as they gnash & gash each other through space & stars & dust.

Here is the mesquite stump after the felling of the forest,
the hog’s decapitated head before taken for the tongue.

A delicacy of sound & resistance & a spirit of each
leaving the stump & the hide.

Here is the hog hide sticky with blood,
& the ax blade wedging the wood stump apart to make

firewood as everyone goes hurriedly about butchering
& they deep-fry freshly fleshed skin.

Here are the empty beer cans the butcher stomped into the soil,
rolling away by a twist of wind. Here are the hands

that fracked, cracked, & broke apart earth’s bones. Tossed her body into
four directions into four whirlwinds into four caves &

returned her to primordial ash, thrashing her spine & femurs & mind,
pummeling her into boulders then stones then gravel then sand.

Accumulating in the empty beer can, caught in a tangle
of stickers & sagging nopales knotted into a heap of decayed diapers. 

Here is she who leaves this place, the wall, & the rapist tonight. Who
will always live this place. Who will take with her

the dollar store around the corner, the dark parking lot,
the job where she gets ripped off each paycheck, a herstory of

fry bread, tortilla, & flauta fund raisers every Sunday after church
surveilled by a paranoid nun sneaking a smoke away from the convent,

who fears the knot of hot winds & a blur of wasps
as the monsoon’s coiled tail smashes her into the wall

paralyzing her legs. Here is the tined mouth of sea
raped of her kelp, fish dismembered & piled in heaps,

& the sea’s spit & vengeance. Here, by the wall, the sun’s
long tongue licks pock fire onto the backs of the nun’s calves.

The wasp puncturing her neck injecting her memories of the violated.
Here is the wasp & stinger filling a thread-thin space between her teeth.

Here is the stinging swollen lip, & eyes covered over by swarm & howl. 
Here is the howl, & poison & the body overtaken.

Here is the body.
Here is the body emptied.

Margo Tamez (Ndé Dene) (she/her) is tribally enrolled Lipan Apache Band of Texas. Her books include FATHER | GENOCIDE (Turtle Point Press, 2021), Raven Eye (University of Arizona Press, 2007), Naked Wanting (University of Arizona Press, 2003), and Alleys & Allies (Saddle Tramp Press, 1992). She is an Associate Professor, appointed in the Indigenous Studies program and affiliated in the MFA Poetry program at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus, on unceded syilx territory. She lives as a guest on unceded sqilxw lands next to N’sis’ooloxw creek, on the Okanagan Indian Band Reserve #1 near Vernon, BC. https://www.margotamez.com

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2022