Laura Bylenok
Rayado
After Chuck Ramirez’s Breakfast Tacos, 2003, from the series Seven Days, ink-jet print, printed 2012
Lean in, invisible. Ask who were we, hungry. What we left. The lead-in to one morning’s afterthought of laughter left us softer, unexposed. Un-posed. We left the evidence of teeth. Of the cut in the carne that makes us flinch. Beneath, the hunch nothing happens again. As if it were over before it began. I wanted the first breakfast again and again. Just a trick, the way a photo keeps us changeless. Strangers. Like the time we painted chinga su and I did cartwheels like a freakshow and fell on my head. I drank all the micheladas. I drank micheladas by the liter from a Styrofoam cup. We were bristled. I was head over heels. Back at the party we filled the tinaco with mezcal and horchata and showered all night. Or I lied. We didn’t meet in the street. Someone whistled at the party. Se chifló. He chiseled letras I could read and I rayada tried to rayar. But he was there and kept on and it was all la letra and dinero and oh, god, tacos. We ate tacos all the way across the border. I pulled a Miller Lite out of my bra and a Lone Star from my wallet. Swallowed. Tried to make the tricks turn real. Acaso el ocaso. I loved the word pardo like la noche parda but the night departed. First word I couldn’t understand was palabra. How to gesticulate such a word, a word. How to get it across. To cross. We crossed ourselves not believing and when we woke up midday bleached out the flowers. The sun leached foil, fell low, and in the margarine the knife sagged slow.