Getting to the Bottom

Getting to the Bottom

Cristina Correa

After Muriel Hasbun’s ¿Sólo una sombra?/Only a Shadow (Ester IV)?, from the series Santos y sombras/Saints and Shadows, 1993-94, gelatin silver print
 
 
Your house is an empty church I barely remember, a body without organs. Its roof burned away, only the steeple stands unhumbled, pews all gone to ash. I thought getting to the bottom meant seeking out darkness, but the steeple finds only light and a new world of growth at its feet. When the leaves have spread across your eyes like a lit veil, no one will tell me you died. No one is strong enough to love your spotted skin and tortured tantrums, except for me because I’m not there. In my pristine prayer room, it’s next spring and your house on stilts is blazing in the softest yellows and low, earth-bearing hums. Your small eyes sparkle, encased in the speckled sea of your face and witchy feather-white hair. Leaves swarm like honeydrunk bees falling slow across your lap, where laughter warms us with its mysterious hollows. And I sit at your dry feet, again, asking everything why? as you braid my blooming hair and teach me your cool, dark magic.

Cristina Correa’s writing has been published or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Vinyl Poetry, and MAKE: A Literary Magazine. She is a ‘Midwestern Voices & Visions’ awardee and has received fellowships from VONA/Voices, Indiana University Writers’ Conference, and Ragdale Foundation. Her poem “Reflection from a Bridge” was selected by Tracy K. Smith for the Best New Poets anthology in 2015. She is an MFA candidate at Cornell University.