Camas para Sueños, Almas Gemelas

Natalia Treviño

After Carmen Lomas Garza’s Camas para Sueños, 1985, gouache on paper

We only knew to grow our squat tangled petals by the river, to morsel them with the aging shoots of palms and feral dung when she was no mother yet, still a girl, younger than these twin daughters now, dreaming under this sulky dreamy sky. We offered her what we knew was good, a hint of wind, a swath of yellow from our hands that had earned their springs—then the year her father stopped holding her close, the year he kept her from curling up on his lap, our ofrenda. The year he let señorita fly from his lips, it was as if he released bats that eat the bloody things, the very lives that scuttle and fly in the night. That was the year her Uelita showed her to dig us up from our root balls, from our coiling white hairs. Leave our bones cold like shivering newborn cats. It was the first time our wild legs dried naked like frightened sticks. Uelita instructed her to place us aside. To sever us from dead leaves, keep our main pouch wrapped, cool and in a silent place. We heard her say, keep them locked all winter like dreams. She unwraps us as if she were lifting a bedspread, covers our dry feelers in ponds of dirt, in whispers, in prayers for flags that lick the water from the air.

Born in Mexico City and raised in San Antonio, Texas, Natalia Treviño is the author of Lavando La Dirty Laundry (Mongrel Empire Press). She is an Associate Professor of English at Northwest Vista College and a member of the Macondo Foundation. Natalia completed her Master’s degree in English at The University of Texas, and she also graduated from the University of Nebraska’s MFA program in Creative Writing. Her poems have won the Alfredo Cisneros de Moral Award, the Wendy Barker Creative Writing Award, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the San Antonio Artist Foundation Literary Prize, and a Bordersenses Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in several literary journals including Borderlands, Texas Poetry Review, Sugar House Review, burnt district, Sliver of Stone, and Voices de la Luna. She has been anthologized as a poet, fiction, and nonfiction writer, with fiction appearing in Curbstone Press’s Mirrors Beneath the Earth, and essays in Shifting Balance Sheets: Women’s Stories of Naturalized Citizens and Complex Allegiances: Constellations of Immigration. She recently completed her first novel, Drinking the Bee Water, a story about immigration and the sacrifice behind it.