Thread Count

Warp

Inventory

My name is Josué Xiloj.
Fifteen since June.
Five foot ten if I stand
the way Coach Bermúdez tells me,
heels light, chin up,
like the crossbar is hanging
from the top of my head.

I keep goal
for the Westlake Condors, under-sixteen,
on the turf at MacArthur Park
where the lake smells of duck and bread crust
and the palm trees lean
like tired linesmen.

Gloves: one pair, size ten,
the latex on the left palm
worn down to a pale coin
from a summer of stopping things.

Languages: three,
if you are generous.
I am not
generous with myself.

Three Languages, One Mouth

Spanish is for the hallway at school,
for Ms. Ochoa and the attendance office,
for the man at the corner store
who lets me pay a quarter short.

English is for the screen at night,
for the boys from Ohio and Manila
who play the same game I play
and call me goat when I save a shot
and call me worse when I don't.

K'iche' is for my grandmother's voice
on the speaker of my mother's phone,
every Sunday at seven,
a sound like water running over stones
in a creek I have never once stood in.

I know four words.
I know them the way you know
the faces of the neighbors
in the building across the alley:
by sight,
never by name.

*Saqarik.* Good morning.
*Maltyox.* Thank you.
*Nan.* Mother, or a woman you respect.
*Utz.* Good. Fine. Okay.
That is the whole bag.

When my grandmother asks a question
longer than those four words
I hand the phone back to Mom
the way you hand back a hot pan.
My face goes the color
of the tamale sauce
Doña Herminia sells on Saturdays.

Arrival, Union Avenue

She comes in September,
the month the Santa Anas
push the smell of the freeway
all the way up our stairs.

My father's cousin Neftalí drives her from the airport
in a minivan with one hubcap.
My mother is at the window by five,
then on the sidewalk by five-ten,
then halfway down the block by five-twenty
in her house sandals,
the hem of her work jeans still white
with lint from the factory.

Abuela Micaela gets out of the van
one shoe at a time.
She is barely taller than my sister Keyla,
who is nine.
Her skirt is a corte,
deep blue, wrapped tight
and folded at the waist,
held by a sash
striped red and yellow and green.
Her blouse, the huipil,
is purple at the shoulders,
and at the neck there is a square
of birds and zigzags so dense
my eyes have to stop
and start again.

Her hair is braided with a ribbon
that goes around and around her head
like a crown somebody
forgot to finish.

She smells like wood smoke
and the inside of an airplane.

The Greeting

My mother says something in K'iche'
that has the word *nan* inside it
and then she stops talking
because her mouth has to do something else.

Keyla says *hola, Abuela*
and gets kissed on both eyes.

I say *Saqarik*
even though it is evening,
even though the sky over the Union Avenue liquor store
is the orange of a construction cone.

My grandmother laughs,
a short laugh, high, like a door hinge,
and puts her hand flat on my chest
where my keeper's number would be,
and says in Spanish,
slowly, so I won't miss it:

*Ya es de noche, mijo.
Pero gracias por la mañana.*

It is already night.
But thank you for the morning.

What She Brings

One duffel bag, red plaid,
the zipper held shut with a strip of cloth.

Inside:
two cortes, folded into bricks.
Three huipiles, one for Sundays.
A sweater the color of oatmeal.
A plastic bag of black beans
that the airport dog did not want.
A plastic bag of dried chiles
that the airport dog wanted very much.
A roll of something long and narrow
wrapped in a striped shawl,
tied with cord in four places,
which she carries to the apartment
herself
and will not let my father touch.

What She Unrolls

In the morning
she kneels on our living room carpet,
the carpet the landlord calls beige
and we call whatever,
and unties the four cords.

Inside the shawl:
sticks.

I count them because I count things.
A keeper counts:
seconds, steps, defenders,
how many times the striker
looks at the left post
before he hits it to the right.

Seven sticks.
Smooth as the handle of a broom
that has swept for thirty years.
Two long ones, thicker.
One flat one, wide, with a dull edge
like a wooden sword in a school play.
A few thin ones, round.
And a strap of leather, curved,
dark at the middle from someone's back.

And between the two thick sticks,
stretched and rolled,
the threads.
White cotton, hundreds of them,
lying side by side like the lines
on a field that has just been chalked.
A few hand-widths at one end
already woven:
red, then that purple, then a rim of gold,
and one small bird, the size of my thumbnail,
facing left.

*Para tu prima*, she says.
For your cousin.
For Marleny. For her fifteen.

Marleny's quinceañera is in March.
It is September.
I do the math.
My grandmother sees me do the math
and laughs the hinge laugh again.

The Far End

*Ven*, she says. Come.

She sits on her heels,
buckles the leather strap behind her back,
ties the near stick to the strap,
and holds out the far stick
to me.

*Agárralo.* Hold it.
*No lo sueltes.* Don't let go.
*Hálalo.* Pull.

So I sit on the floor
with the far end of a quinceañera
in my two goalkeeper hands
and lean back
and the threads go tight between us,
three hundred and twelve threads,
she tells me later,
three hundred and twelve,
and every one of them
hums a little
when she runs her thumb across.

She leans back too.
That's how it works, I learn.
Her body is one post.
I am the other.
The cloth lives
in the tension in between.

She lifts a thin stick,
and half the threads rise
like a wall of defenders
jumping at the same time.
Into the gap she slides the flat wooden sword,
turns it on its edge,
passes a little bundle of red
from her right hand to her left,
and then brings the sword down
toward her own belly,
*tac*,
*tac*,
two short claps of wood on thread,
a sound like a ball
hitting a post
and not going in.

*Uno*, she says.

Not one thread.
One row.
One pass.
She does it again.
*Dos.*

I hold my end.
My arms shake by forty.
By sixty I have counted
the cracks in the ceiling,
the stripes on her sash,
the beats of the bass
from the apartment below.
By eighty she stops,
unhooks the strap,
and looks at me the way Coach looks
when you come off your line
at exactly the right moment.

*Mañana*, she says. Tomorrow.

Nobody asked me
if I'd come back tomorrow.
That is how I know
I already said yes.

Twelve Yards

Geometry I

A regulation goal
is eight yards wide
and eight feet tall.
Twenty-four feet of open air
and one of me.

The penalty spot is twelve yards out.
A good kick gets there
in under half a second.
Nobody can react in half a second.
So you don't react.
You guess, and you call the guess
reading.

Coach Bermúdez draws it on the whiteboard
in the rec center office,
a rectangle and a dot,
a cone of dotted lines between them
like the light from a flashlight.

*Your whole life is in that cone*, he says,
and eats a sunflower seed
and spits the shell
into a foam cup.

Geometry II

My grandmother's loom
is as wide as my forearm
from elbow to the end of my fingers.
Thirteen and a half inches, I measure,
with Keyla's school ruler,
while Abuela watches me measure
like I am checking whether
the sun came up.

*Es uno de tres*, she says.
This is one of three.
Three panels, sewn side by side,
make one huipil.
One for the back and the front,
one for each side.

I do that math too.
Three hundred and twelve threads
times three panels.
Nine hundred and thirty-six threads
from one end of Marleny's shoulders
to the other.

The goal is a rectangle you defend.
The loom is a rectangle you fill.
I am trying to figure out
which one is harder.

The Post

The second day she ties the far stick
to the leg of the bunk bed
Keyla and I sleep in,
a cord looped twice,
a knot I can't follow
even when she does it slowly.

The bunk bed creaks
every time she leans back.
Keyla, on the top bunk,
reading a book about a horse,
says the room is moving.

*Es que la cama quiere tejer*, Abuela says.
The bed wants to weave.

The third day she asks for me again.
*El palo no habla*, she says.
The post doesn't talk.
I think she means
she wants company.
I think she means
something else too
and I am not ready to know what.

Rony at the Door

Rony Menjívar plays left back
and has known me since kindergarten
at Hoover Elementary,
where we were both put
in the reading group called Bluebirds
and both pretended we weren't.

He knocks on Thursday
to walk to practice
and finds me on the carpet
holding a stick with three hundred
and twelve threads tied to it,
leaning back like a man water-skiing
behind a very small boat.

He doesn't say anything at first.
That's the worst part.
He takes out his phone.
I let go of one hand
to wave at him to put it away,
and the whole warp goes slack
like a net with no wind in it,
and my grandmother says one word
in K'iche'
I don't need translated.

*Perdón, Abuela*, Rony says.
He calls her Abuela already.
Rony calls every old woman in Westlake Abuela.
It works for him.
It gets him a lot of free pan dulce.

On the walk to the park he says,
*So you're knitting now.*

*It's not knitting.*

*So what is it.*

*Weaving.*

*Okay, Grandpa.*

*Grandma*, I correct him,
because if I'm going to be insulted
it should be accurate,
and he laughs so hard he has to stop
at the light on Seventh
and lean on a newspaper box
that hasn't held a newspaper
since we were eight.

Practice

The lights at MacArthur Park come on at six
with a sound like a huge
refrigerator door opening.

Coach puts me in goal
and lines up the U-16s
with a bag of balls.

Twelve yards.
I watch the hips.
The ball goes where the hips say,
not where the eyes say.
Strikers lie with their eyes.
Hips are honest.

I save four of ten.
Four is good.
Four is better than most nights.

Afterward, pulling off my gloves,
I find a single white thread
wound around my left wrist,
tight, just under the cuff.
I don't know how it got there.
I don't take it off.

Kitchen Table, Night

My mother sits at the kitchen table
with a sheet of graph paper
my grandmother drew on this afternoon,
the pattern for the band at the neck
of Marleny's huipil,
and a cup of coffee made of mostly milk.

The band is a row of little squares
that will be thread someday.
Before you weave a band, Abuela says,
you say who goes in it.
So my mother writes names
along the bottom margin in pencil,
from the youngest up.

First: Keyla and me.
Then: Mom and Dad.
Beside Mom: Tía Olga.
Under Tía Olga: Marleny.
Above Mom, a new name,
pressing hard with the pencil,
one letter at a time:
*Micaela Batz Chox.*

*¿Y su mamá?* my mother asks.
And her mother?

Abuela is on the couch,
the oatmeal sweater pulled over the huipil,
her feet not touching the floor.
She says a name.
*Manuela.*
My mother writes it.
A new line, higher.
*¿Y el papá?*
A name.
A line.
*¿Y sus hermanos?*

My grandmother counts on her fingers,
the way she counts rows.
She gets to five
and stops,
and starts again,
and gets to five,
and the sixth finger,
the thumb of the other hand,
stays where it is,
folded down,
and she doesn't say anything about it.

My mother writes five.
She doesn't ask
about the thumb.
I don't either.

My grandmother takes the pencil
and fills in five small people
along the band on the graph paper,
arms out, three squares tall,
one for each name she said.
After the fifth she leaves
three squares empty
and starts the border again.

On her phone
my mother pins a dot to a map,
a town in the mountains
going up and to the left of everything,
a dot called Chuwi Pinal,
which my grandmother says means
something like
*above the pine trees*,
or *on top of*,
and then she shrugs
and says the town means the town.

Five small people in a row.
Room on the paper for a sixth.
Three white squares.
Then my mother folds the sheet into her notebook
and says it's late
and it is.

Numbers Before Sleep

Three hundred and twelve.
Twenty-four by eight.
Twelve yards.
Half a second.
Five sisters and brothers.
One thumb folded down.

In the dark, the bunk bed
creaks a little
when Keyla turns over,
and I can feel the cord
still knotted at the foot,
waiting for the morning,
for the pull.

Alvarado, Saturday

Map

From our building on Union Avenue
you walk up to Seventh,
turn left at the bakery with the pink cake in the window
that has been the same pink cake
since I was six,
and walk until the sidewalk
stops being a sidewalk
and starts being a market.

Nobody drew this market.
It grew,
the way moss grows
on the north side of things.

Saturday, Nine in the Morning

Blue tarps tied to the parking meters.
Folding tables with legs that don't match.
Sneakers in rows, soles up,
like fish on ice.
Phone cases, phone chargers,
phone chargers for phones
nobody has had since 2015.
Socks, ten for ten dollars.
Belts with eagle buckles.
Baby clothes on hangers hooked to the chain-link fence,
little jumpers swinging
in the breath of every bus that passes.

A man sells pineapple in tall cups,
cut into spears,
lime and chile and salt
thrown on so red
it looks like a mistake.
A woman with a cooler on wheels
sells cut cucumber and jícama in bags.
Another one sells elotes,
the corn on the cob slathered white with mayonnaise,
then rolled in cheese,
then dusted with more chile,
until the corn is barely corn,
just a reason to hold the rest.

The air is fry oil and car exhaust
and the sweet burnt smell
of somebody's churro cart
and under all of it
the old-fruit smell of the gutter.

Doña Herminia's Tamales

Doña Herminia is from Huehuetenango
and sells from a steel pot
the size of a small trash can,
lid wrapped in a towel to keep the steam in.

Her tamales come in banana leaf,
not corn husk,
folded flat and tied with a strip of leaf,
and when you open one on the curb
the steam comes up green-smelling
and the masa inside is soft as pudding,
red with the sauce,
a piece of pork and a green olive
and one strip of sweet red pepper
hiding in it like a prize.

Abuela buys two
and eats one standing up,
looking at it,
the way you look at a photo of a cousin
to decide whether they got tall.

*Está bueno*, she says finally.
It's good.
Then: *Le falta.*
It's missing something.

She doesn't say what.
Doña Herminia doesn't ask.
Somehow they both know
and both agree
and Doña Herminia gives her
a third one free.

Rony's Mother's Pupusas

Rony's mother is from Usulután, El Salvador,
and on Saturdays she runs a griddle
under a blue canopy
with a hand-painted sign
that says only PUPUSAS,
as if there could be any question.

She pats the masa
between two palms
clap clap clap clap,
a rhythm faster than a drum fill,
fills it with beans and cheese,
or chicharrón ground to a paste,
or the little green buds of loroco
that smell like a garden after watering,
folds it shut,
pats it round again,
and lays it on the griddle
where it hisses
and starts to freckle brown.

Curtido comes in a jar,
cabbage and carrot and oregano
gone sour and bright,
and the red salsa is thin as water
and you pour it over everything.

Abuela watches Rony's mother's hands
for a long time,
longer than she watched the tamale.
I can see her counting the claps.
When Rony's mother hands her a pupusa on a paper plate,
my grandmother says *gracias*
and then, under her breath,
*maltyox*,
and Rony's mother says *¿cómo?*
and my grandmother says
*nada, nada*,
and blushes.

I didn't know she could blush.
I didn't know she was shy
about her own word.

The Thread Stall

At the end of the block,
past the man who sells ceramic piggy banks
and ceramic frogs on the same table,
there is a shop with a real door
and a real cash register
and a sign in the window:
CORTES — HUIPILES — FAJAS — HILO.

Inside it smells like a closet
in a house where somebody's aunt lives.
Cortes folded and stacked to the ceiling,
blues and blacks and purples,
the cloth tie-dyed before weaving
so the patterns blur at the edges
like something seen through water.
Fajas hanging in rows,
striped, tasseled, stiff as belts.

And the thread:
a whole wall of it.
Little skeins twisted into figure eights,
shiny, slick,
mercerized cotton,
the woman at the counter says,
*sedalina*,
in every color I knew the name of
and forty I didn't.

Abuela goes up to the wall
like I'd go up to a wall of gloves.
She doesn't touch anything at first.
She looks for a whole minute.
Then she pulls one skein,
a red,
and holds it to the light from the door,
and puts it back.
Pulls another red.
Puts it back.

Seven reds.
I count.
She buys the fifth one.

*¿Por qué ése?* I ask.
Why that one?

*Porque los otros gritan*, she says.
Because the others shout.

Prices

The woman at the counter
is from somewhere near Xela too.
She and Abuela talk in K'iche',
fast, warm, quick laughs,
a game of catch with a ball
I can't see.

I stand by the door
with a cup of pineapple in my hand
and catch my name, *Josué*,
going past me twice,
and one word in Spanish,
*portero*,
goalkeeper,
tossed into the middle of it like a ball onto a crowded field.

The woman looks at me
over her reading glasses.
She asks me something in K'iche'.
Five words, maybe six.
I stand there.
The pineapple drips chile on my shoe.

*No habla*, my grandmother says.
He doesn't speak.
She says it kindly.
She says it the way you'd say
*he doesn't eat pork*,
a fact, not a crime.

It feels like a crime anyway.
It feels like letting one in
between my own legs
with the whole bench watching.

Walking Home

On the way back
Abuela holds the bag with the red thread
against her chest,
inside her shawl,
the way people on Alvarado
hold their wallets.

The buses pass so close
the shawl lifts.
A man on the corner sings along to a speaker
in his shopping cart,
a love song, loud,
about a train that left without him.
Two pigeons fight over a tortilla
on the hot cement.

At the light on Seventh
my grandmother says, not looking at me:

*Yo tampoco hablaba inglés en el avión.*
I didn't speak English on the airplane either.
*Y llegué.*
And I got here.

Then the light changes
and she walks into the crosswalk
like it belongs to her,
and the cars wait,
and I follow
three steps behind
with the pineapple
and my mouth full of words
in the wrong language.

The Bus Down Seventh

Lunch Run

Wednesday is a half day at school.
Wednesday my mother forgets her lunch,
or says she forgets,
so somebody has to bring it.

This Wednesday the somebody is two:
me, and Abuela Micaela,
who has never been on a city bus
that didn't have chickens on it,
or so she tells Keyla,
and Keyla believes her,
and so, mostly, do I.

In a plastic bag:
rice, black beans, two tortillas wrapped in a dish towel,
a hard-boiled egg,
a little container of salsa
my grandmother made that morning
from tomatoes charred black on the stove burner,
smashed with onion and cilantro and salt
in our one stone bowl.

The Bus

The bus down Seventh
smells like a hot seat cushion
and somebody's orange.

Abuela sits by the window
with the lunch bag in her lap
and her feet on the bar
because they don't reach the floor.

Out the glass:
the bridal shop with the dresses
in plastic bags,
the bridal shop next to it
with the same dresses,
the check-cashing place,
the hotel that's been closed
since before I was born,
a mural of a woman with a crown of roses
peeling at the knees,
a man asleep on cardboard
with his shoes neatly side by side
by his head,
a woman pushing a cart of folded laundry
up the hill, singing.

At every stop, people get on
and look at my grandmother.
Not mean. Just looking.
The corte, the huipil, the ribbon.
A girl of maybe six in a plaid school jumper
stares so hard
her mother has to turn her head
with one finger.

My grandmother looks back
at all of them,
the same way,
like it's a fair trade.

The Garment District

Downtown the streets change.
Signs in Spanish and Korean and English
on the same building.
Bolts of fabric leaning in doorways
like tall people waiting for a ride.
Rolling racks pushed down the middle of the street,
dresses swaying,
a man shouting *¡cuidado!*
to the cars and the cars actually listening.

The building where my mother sews
has a freight elevator with a gate
you pull across by hand,
and on the fourth floor
the sound comes through the door
before we open it:
a hundred motors
running at once,
a sound like rain
if rain were made of tiny engines.

My Mother at Work

My mother sits in the third row,
fourth station,
under a fluorescent tube
that flickers every eleven seconds.
I count it while we wait.

She sews side seams.
Only side seams.
A woman to her left does sleeves.
A woman behind her does hems.
The blouses come to my mother
in bundles of thirty,
tied with a strip of the same cloth,
and she unties the bundle,
and sews, and sews, and sews,
and ties them again,
and marks a ticket,
and the ticket is the money.

She is paid by the piece.
I knew that. I didn't *know* it.

Her foot on the pedal.
Her hands guiding the cloth
under the needle
so fast the needle disappears
into a blur
like the blades of a fan.
A blouse every forty seconds.
Ninety an hour,
if nothing jams.

She doesn't look up for a long time.
When she does
and sees us by the door,
her face does something I've never seen it do:
it goes young.
Then it goes back.

Ten Minutes

She is allowed ten minutes.
We sit on an upside-down bucket
and a crate of thread cones
by the window that looks at another window.

My mother eats the egg in two bites
and the salsa with a tortilla
and closes her eyes for a second
at the taste of the burned tomatoes.

Abuela watches her daughter's hands.
I watch my grandmother watch.

*¿Cuántas?* Abuela asks.
How many?

*Seiscientas, si no se traba*, my mother says,
which means six hundred,
if the needle doesn't jam,
which means six hundred, maybe.

Abuela nods slowly.
She looks at the long tables
and the women in rows,
their heads bent at the same angle,
their feet on the pedals,
and she says something in K'iche'
very quietly,
and my mother laughs
in a way that is almost crying
and wipes her mouth with the dish towel
and says, *Ay, nan.*

I ask what she said.
My mother says,
*She said we weave too fast here.*

That's not all she said.
I can tell by the length of it.
But it's what my mother
gives me.

What the Bus Is For

On the way home
my grandmother is quiet
until Alvarado,
and then she says, in Spanish,
looking out the window:

*Tu mamá tejía bonito.*
Your mother used to weave beautifully.
*Mejor que yo, a los doce años.*
Better than me, at twelve.

I didn't know my mother wove.
I didn't know my mother
had been twelve.
I mean, I knew.
I didn't know.

*¿Y por qué dejó?* I ask.
Why did she stop?

My grandmother watches a man
on a bicycle with a cooler of ice cream bars
ring his bell at nobody.

*Porque aquí no hay tiempo de tejer.*
Because here there's no time to weave.
*Aquí se cose.*
Here you sew.

Night, the Pictures

At home that night
my mother does something new.

She takes the three huipiles out of the duffel
and lays them one by one
across the kitchen table,
smoothing them with both hands
the way she smoothed my hair
when I was small and sick.

She takes a picture of each one
with her phone,
standing on a chair to get it all in.
Front, back, the square at the neck,
up close on the birds.

Then on the laptop
she makes a page for each,
and under each picture
types who made it, and when,
asking her mother every time:

*Huipil de domingo. Micaela Batz Chox. 1998.*
*Huipil morado. Micaela Batz Chox. 2011.*
*Faja roja y amarilla. Manuela Chox.*
and next to that one, a question mark
where the year should go,
because my grandmother doesn't remember
or won't say.

Then my mother goes to the hall closet
and stands on her toes
and brings down a shoebox
I have seen my whole life
and never thought about,
and inside it, folded in tissue,
a small square cloth,
like a napkin,
white with one row of red birds
marching across the middle,
a little crooked,
one of them with a too-long neck.

She takes a picture of it.
She types:
*Servilleta. Rosalinda Batz. 12 años.*

My grandmother puts her finger
on the bird with the long neck.
She says, *Ésta se te fue.*
That one got away from you.

And my mother says *sí*,
and laughs,
and doesn't stop laughing
for a while,
and Keyla comes out in her pajamas
to see what's funny,
and nobody can explain it to her,
and that's fine,
it's not a thing
you explain.

Cochineal, Indigo

October Light

In October the light in our living room
comes in sideways at four o'clock
through the gap between our building
and the one with the satellite dishes,
a yellow stripe across the carpet
exactly as wide as the loom.

My grandmother moves the loom
to sit in it.
Every day she moves it a little,
following the stripe
the way a cat follows the warm spot,
until by the end of the month
she is weaving half in the kitchen.

Picking Up

Now the birds have started.
The birds are harder.

For the plain cloth
she lifts the stick,
half the threads rise,
she passes the color, *tac, tac*.

For the birds
she has to choose.
With a pointed stick of bone-colored wood
or just her fingernail,
she picks up one thread,
skips three,
picks up two,
skips one,
across the warp,
counting under her breath
in a language I don't have the numbers for.

Into the little tunnels she makes
she slides a strand of colored thread,
loose, not pulled tight,
so the color floats on top
like a duck on the lake at MacArthur Park.

Row by row,
a bird stands up out of the white.

*Cuenta conmigo*, she says.
Count with me.

So I count in Spanish.
She counts in K'iche'.
For a while we are two clocks
in the same room
ticking at slightly different speeds,
and then we line up,
and then she smiles
without looking at me,
and I lose count.

The Little Bag

On Sunday she takes out
a small cloth bag,
the drawstring frayed,
and inside it,
wrapped in a page of an old newspaper
from a city I've never seen,
two small hanks of thread.

Not shiny like the market thread.
Matte. A little fuzzy.
Hand-spun, she says,
by her mother, Manuela,
on a spindle twirled in a gourd.

One is red,
but a red I've never seen in Los Angeles:
not the red of stop signs,
not the red of the Chivas jersey
on half the kids at school,
but a red with blood in it
and something dusty,
like the inside of a pomegranate
gone a little dry.

One is blue,
a deep blue,
the blue of the sky over the park
twenty minutes after sunset,
when the lights have come on
but the sky hasn't given up yet.

Cochinilla

*La roja*, she says, *es de animalito.*
The red is from a little animal.

A tiny bug, she tells me,
that lives on the paddles of the nopal cactus
in a white fuzz like cotton.
You brush them off,
you dry them in the sun,
you grind them,
and they turn the water red
as if a heart had been dropped in it.

I look it up later.
She's right.
It's called cochineal.
They used to sell it to Europe
for kings' coats.

*¿Y tu mamá la hizo?*
Did your mom make it?

*Ella la tiñó*, she says.
She dyed it.
*Yo le ayudé. Tenía tus años.*
I helped her. I was your age.
*Me salió todo rojo aquí.*
It came out all red here.

She shows me her hands,
the palms brown and creased,
the knuckles big,
two fingers on the left a little bent,
from weaving or from something,
and I try to picture them
stained red to the wrist,
fifteen years old,
laughing maybe,
in a yard I've never stood in.

Jiquilite

The blue is from a plant
she calls *jiquilite*,
that grows down in the hot country
toward the coast,
leaves you soak until they rot
and the water smells, she says,
like a bad egg,
*huele feo, feo*,
and she pinches her nose and makes a face
so Keyla will laugh,
and Keyla does.

You beat the water to make it foam.
The foam goes from green to blue.
The thread comes out yellow-green
and turns blue in the air
while you watch,
like magic,
like a bruise healing backward.

*No es magia*, she says, when I say so.
It isn't magic.
*Es trabajo.*
It's work.

Where It Goes

She doesn't use much.
That's what I notice.

Marleny's huipil is mostly market thread,
the fifth red, the purple, the gold.
Bright. Strong. Good thread.
But in the square at the neck,
where you'd only see it
if you were close enough
to hug her,
my grandmother lays in
a single strand of her mother's red
along one zigzag,
and a single strand of her mother's blue
along the zigzag under it.

You almost can't tell.
I can tell
because I watched her do it.
Because I counted.

*¿Por qué ahí?* I ask.
Why there?

She ties off the thread.
*Para que la abrace*, she says.
So it hugs her.

The Question

I ask her what the birds mean.

She looks at me for a while.
She has a way of looking
that makes you feel like a field
she's walking across
to see if the ground is dry.

*Son de mi pueblo*, she says.
They're from my town.

*Pero ¿qué significan?*
But what do they mean?

*Significan mi pueblo.*
They mean my town.

I ask about the zigzags.
Same answer.
I ask about the colors.
Same answer, mostly,
except she says the purple is just
because Marleny likes purple.

I could look it up.
There are websites.
People who write about the weaving
of the highland towns,
pictures with captions in English
saying what this means and that means.

I don't look it up.
It seems like cheating.
It seems like reading somebody's diary
when they're in the room.

Zigzag

At practice Coach sets up the cones
in a zigzag
for footwork,
and I go through them
side, side, side, side,
and on the third cone
I start counting in my head
the way she counts,
*pick one, skip three, pick two*,
and my feet go faster than they've ever gone,
and Coach says *Xiloj! What was that?*
and I say *nothing*,
and he says *do it again*,
and I can't,
because I started thinking about it.

On the way home I tell Rony.
I expect him to laugh.

He doesn't.
He says his mom says the same thing
about the pupusas.
Clap, clap, turn, clap.
Don't think.
If you think, they tear.

Nine Hundred and Thirty-Six

Here is what I know by the end of October:
a warp is the threads that go long.
A weft is the thread that goes across.
The flat stick is called the sword.
The strap goes behind your back.
You are the loom.
The loom is you.
If you lean forward the cloth goes loose.
If you lean too far back it breaks.

And here is what I don't know:
the numbers in K'iche'.
I've heard them a thousand times now,
under her breath,
counting rows.
I could hum them.
I can't say them.

It's like knowing a song
by the shape of it
and not one word.

The Committee

Eighth Street, Upstairs

Above the shop on Eighth Street
that sends money and boxes to Guatemala,
the shop with the poster of a smiling family
holding a refrigerator,
there is a room.

Folding chairs. A folding table.
A water cooler that glugs
every time somebody's argument
gets to its best part.
On the wall, a calendar
from a hardware store in Totonicapán,
the month of March,
from three years ago.
Nobody has turned the page.
Nobody wants to.
It has a picture of the volcano.

This is where the Committee meets,
first Sunday of the month, at five.
The Committee for the Betterment
of Chuwi Pinal in Los Angeles.
That's the whole name.
On the banner it takes two lines.

Who Is There

Don Cipriano Tzoc, the president,
who has a mustache like a push broom
and a voice that doesn't need the microphone
nobody ever plugs in.

Doña Felipa, the treasurer,
with a spiral notebook
and a calculator from the nineties
that prints a little paper tape
she tears off and staples to every page.

Twelve men in cowboy hats and work jackets.
Nine women, some in cortes,
some in jeans,
one in scrubs straight from her shift.
Children in the back, under the window,
playing a game with bottle caps.

My mother.
My grandmother, front row,
because when she walks in
Don Cipriano stands up
and gives her his chair
and nobody else says a word about it
and a man I don't know
takes off his hat.

The School

There is a laptop and a projector
borrowed from somebody's niece's school
and a sheet taped to the wall.

On the sheet:
the school in Chuwi Pinal.
Two rooms, cinderblock,
painted blue a long time ago.
A tin roof
with holes in it
you can see from the inside
as stars.
Kids at the desks,
thirty, maybe,
in sweaters,
looking at the camera
like it's going to take something from them.

*El techo*, Don Cipriano says.
The roof.
*En junio entra el agua.*
In June the water comes in.

A woman stands up and says
the teacher put buckets.
A man says buckets don't help
when it's sideways.
Another man says the problem isn't the roof,
it's the beams,
and then they argue about the beams
in K'iche',
which is good,
because I don't follow it,
and I can just watch:
how the hands go up,
how the voices climb a step
and then one man laughs
and they all come down.

What They Need

Doña Felipa reads out the numbers.

Lámina, the sheet metal: so much.
Beams: so much.
The man in the town who will do the work: so much,
and he gave a good price
because his son is in the second room.
Gutters: so much, if there is money,
which there isn't yet.

Total: a number that makes the room
go quiet the way a stadium goes quiet
before a free kick.

What they have: a number
about a third of that.

*Faltan*, Doña Felipa says,
and says what is missing,
and tears off the paper tape,
and staples it.

The Plan

A kermés.
A fair, the first Sunday of December,
in the parking lot of the building
if the landlord says yes,
which he will,
Don Cipriano says,
because he owes Don Cipriano a favor
nobody is ever going to explain to me.

Tamales. Atol. A raffle.
A marimba, if the brothers from San Cristóbal
will play for less.
Somebody's uncle will make the shucos,
the Guatemalan hot dogs,
with guacamole and cabbage
and the sausage cut open on the grill.

And for the raffle,
the big prize,
a woman stands and says:
a corte, new, from the foot looms back home.
And a faja.
And somebody turns,
everybody turns,
to the front row.

Abuela Says No

My grandmother shakes her head.

Everybody waits.

She says something in K'iche'.
Then, because she sees me,
in Spanish:

*El huipil es de mi nieta.*
The huipil is my granddaughter's.
*Pero les tejo una cinta.*
But I'll weave you a ribbon.

A cinta is the long narrow band
women here wrap in their hair.
It's maybe two fingers wide
and as long as from here
to the bathroom door.

The room claps.
Doña Felipa writes it down.
Don Cipriano says *maltyox, nan*,
in a voice that is almost a bow,
and I write it down too,
in my head,
the way he said it.
*Maltyox, nan.*
I could say that.
Two words. I could.

The Kid with the Laptop

After, Don Cipriano finds me
by the water cooler.

He says I'm Micaela's grandson,
the goalkeeper.
I say yes.
He says his nephew saw me
save a penalty at Lafayette Park in August.
I say it was just one.
He says one is one more than zero.
Then he says:
*¿Y la computadora? ¿Le sabes?*
And the computer? You know it?

The Committee has a page.
Not public.
Private.
Only people from Chuwi Pinal and their families,
in L.A., in Houston, in the town itself.
Photos of the school.
The receipts from the roof,
when there's a roof.
A list of who gave what
that only the Committee can see.
And a place where the teacher back home
can put pictures of the kids
that only the families can open.

Doña Felipa's niece used to run it.
Doña Felipa's niece moved to Phoenix.

*Me ayudas*, Don Cipriano says.
It isn't a question.

So I sit at the folding table
with Doña Felipa
and her notebook,
and she reads me names
and I type them in,
one family at a time,
and she decides,
for each,
whether they can see the list of who gave
or only the pictures of the school.

She's strict.
A man named Hilario gets pictures only.
*Habla mucho*, she says.
He talks too much.

The Marimba Brothers

The last thing that happens
is a man comes up the stairs
with a long wooden case on his shoulder
like a coffin for a giant flute,
and it turns out to be the keys
of a marimba,
and he and his brother set it up in the corner,
the frame, the legs, the long row of wooden bars
from big to small,
and under each bar a wooden box,
a long one under the low notes,
short ones under the high,
and at the bottom of each box
a little window of thin skin
that buzzes
when the note above it rings,
a sound like a bee
stuck inside a wooden bell.

They play one song,
to show they still can,
four hands, and then a cousin
who was late up the stairs
takes the high end, and it's six,
mallets wrapped in rubber,
the low notes so deep
I feel them in the folding chair.

Abuela doesn't dance.
She sits very straight
and taps one foot,
one, two, three,
one, two, three,
and her eyes go somewhere
I don't have a map for.

When the song ends
she says, to nobody,
*Así era.*
That's how it was.

And I want to ask
*how what was*,
and I don't,
because the brothers are already
packing up the keys,
and the water cooler glugs,
and Don Cipriano is calling for chairs to be stacked,
and the moment closes
like the curtain on a stall
at the end of a Saturday.

Saqarik

Every Morning

Every morning at six-ten
my grandmother is already up,
already dressed,
the corte folded and tied,
the ribbon wound,
the coffee made in a pot on the stove
with cinnamon and too much sugar.

Every morning she says
*Saqarik*
when I come out of the bathroom
with my hair wet.

Every morning I say
*Buenos días, Abuela.*

It's not on purpose.
It's like when you've been diving
to the left all season
and your body goes left
before you tell it.

Keyla

Keyla says *Saqarik*
on the third morning.

On the fifth morning
she says something longer,
three words,
and my grandmother claps her hands
and answers,
and they go back and forth
twice,
three times,
across the breakfast table,
over my cereal,
a pass, a return, a pass,
and I am the guy in the middle
in a game of monkey in the middle
who has given up jumping.

Keyla is nine.
Keyla learns songs from the radio
in one listen
and can do every voice in every cartoon.
It isn't fair to compare.

I compare.

What Shame Tastes Like

Like the cardboard
of a cup of school milk.
Like a penny.
Like the moment after you let one in
and the striker runs past you
toward the corner flag
with his finger to his lips,
and you have to pick the ball
out of the back of the net
yourself.

The Plan

Here's what I decide:
if I can't learn it in the air,
I'll learn it on paper.
Write it down. Study it.
Like set pieces.
Like film of the other team.

I ask my grandmother
if I can record her.
Just counting.
Just the numbers, one to twenty,
slow,
so I can play them back on the bus.

She looks at my phone
like it's a small animal
that might bite.

Then she says *bueno*
and sits up straight,
the way people sit
for a picture at a wedding.

Recording

The red dot.
The little line of sound
going up and down on the screen
like the edge of a mountain.

She counts.
*Jun.*
*Keb'.*
*Oxib'.*
She goes slowly.
She looks at me after each one
to see if I've got it.

After ten she stops counting
and keeps talking.

I don't stop the recording.

Transcript

That night I type it out,
what I can,
on the laptop at the kitchen table
after my mother goes to bed.

This is what it looks like:

> jun. keb. oxib. [four?] [five?] [six — something with a w]
> [up to ten]
> then Spanish:
> "Así me enseñó mi mamá. Contando."
> (That's how my mom taught me. Counting.)
> [K'iche', long, maybe 20 seconds. word that sounds like "chuch"? twice]
> "Ella me ponía el palo en la mano y decía: no lo sueltes."
> (She'd put the stick in my hand and say: don't let go.)
> [laughs]
> [K'iche'. I don't know. I don't know any of it.]
> "Yo tenía siete años. Ocho."
> (I was seven. Eight.)
> "Tejí desde chiquita. Siempre tejí."
> (I wove since I was little. I always wove.)
> [pause, 6 seconds]
> "Menos unos años."
> (Except a few years.)
> [pause, 11 seconds]
> [K'iche', very quiet. one word I think is "ja" — house? or yes?]
> "No había dónde amarrar el palo."
> (There was nowhere to tie the stick.)
> [pause, 9 seconds]
> "Dormíamos donde estaba callado."
> (We slept where it was quiet.)
> [pause, 14 seconds]
> "Apágalo, mijo."
> (Turn it off.)

And then it ends,
because I did.

The Pauses

I count the pauses.
That's the only part
I know how to read.

Six seconds.
Eleven.
Nine.
Fourteen.

Fourteen seconds is long.
Fourteen seconds is the time
between the referee's whistle
and the ball crossing the line
on a slow penalty,
the kind where the kicker
stutters his steps
to make you move first.

I don't move first.
I don't ask her about the years.
Some things,
you wait for the kicker.

My Mother Reads It

My mother finds the transcript
on the laptop in the morning.
I left it open.
I didn't mean to.
Maybe I did.

She reads it standing up
with her coffee and her keys.

She doesn't say anything
about the years.
She doesn't say anything
about the place where it was quiet.

She sits down,
sets the keys on the table,
and with one finger,
slowly,
she fills in the blanks.
Four. Five. Six.
Seven through ten.
The word that sounds like *chuch*
— it's *chuch*, she types, *mother* —
and a few other words,
and next to the one I thought was *house*,
she types *house*,
and next to some of the long parts
she types nothing,
and next to one she types,
*no te lo puedo traducir*,
I can't translate this for you,
and then, under it,
*todavía.*
Yet.

She saves it.
She saves my grandmother's voice
with my bad typing and her good typing
in the same file,
in the folder with the pictures of the huipiles,
and she adds the date
and both our names
at the bottom.

Then she picks up her keys
and goes to catch the bus,
late,
and I hear her running down the stairs.

Practice, Under My Breath

On the bus to school
I play the counting with one earbud.
*Jun. Keb'. Oxib'.*
My lips move.

A man across the aisle
in a reflective vest
looks over.
He's maybe fifty.
He has Neftalí's eyebrows,
or Don Cipriano's,
or I think he does,
whatever I think I know.

He doesn't say anything.
He just nods,
one time,
slow,
like a keeper nodding to his center back
before a corner kick:
*I see you. I'm here.*

Then he gets off at Hoover
and I never see him again.

Saqarik, Again

Friday morning.
Six-ten.
Hair wet.
Cinnamon and sugar.

*Saqarik*, she says.

My body goes left.
I make it go right.

*Saqarik, Abuela.*

She doesn't clap.
She doesn't make a big deal.
That's the thing about her:
she knows that if she claps,
I'll never do it again.

She pours me a cup of the coffee
I'm not supposed to drink
and pushes it across the table
with two fingers,
and goes back to her loom
by the window,
and leans back into the strap,
and the threads go tight,
and the sword comes down,
*tac, tac*,
and I count it,
*jun, keb'*,
in my head,
in her numbers,
just the first two,
just the ones I'm sure of.

Bad Hands

Kermés, First Sunday of December

The parking lot behind Eighth Street
smells like charcoal and banana leaf by ten.

Strings of little flags,
blue and white,
zigzag from the fire escape
to the light pole.
The marimba brothers in the shade
of the dumpster enclosure,
which nobody mentions.
Shucos on the grill,
the sausages split and blistering,
the bread toasted on the same grate,
guacamole spread thick as plaster,
cabbage, mustard, mayonnaise,
a line of people that goes
all the way out to the sidewalk.

Atol de elote in a steel pot,
sweet and thick, pale yellow,
corn and milk and cinnamon,
ladled into foam cups
too hot to hold,
so people hold them
with their sleeves pulled over their hands.

I sell tamales with Doña Felipa
at a folding table,
two dollars, three for five,
and by noon I can say *gracias*
in a voice that sounds
like it belongs to somebody older.

The Raffle

The cinta my grandmother wove
in three weeks, at night,
on a narrow warp
tied to the doorknob of the bathroom
so that nobody could use the bathroom
without stepping over her,
hangs from a hanger
on the chain-link fence.

Two fingers wide.
As long as a man is tall.
Red with a stripe of gold,
and a row of the same zigzags
that are in Marleny's neck square,
small, so small,
like the zigzags were whispering.

People come and touch the end of it
and buy tickets.
Women mostly.
A few men who look at it
and then at their wives
and then buy tickets.

At four Don Cipriano pulls the winner
from a plastic bucket
that used to hold paint.

It's Hilario.

The man who talks too much.
The man who gets pictures only.

He stands there holding the cinta
across both arms
like it's a baby somebody handed him
at a party,
and he doesn't say anything at all,
not one word,
for the first time in recorded history,
and Doña Felipa laughs so hard
she has to sit down on the cooler.

Later I see him give it to his wife.
She wraps it in her hair right there.
He watches her do it
with his hat in his hands.

The roof money, at the end of the day,
is a number Doña Felipa writes down
and circles twice.
Still not enough.
Closer.

My Turn

That night
my grandmother takes the cinta warp off the doorknob,
a new one, short,
and ties the far end
to the leg of the kitchen table
and holds out the strap.

*Te toca*, she says.
Your turn.

I put the strap behind my back.
It's warm from her.
It smells like her sweater.
I lean back.
The threads go tight.

She shows me:
lift the stick,
open the shed,
slide the sword in,
turn it,
pass the thread,
bring the sword down.
*Tac. Tac.*

I lift the stick.
Half the threads come up.
Some of the other half come up too,
stuck,
like defenders who didn't hear the call
and are standing in the wrong place
for the offside trap.
I slide the sword in.
It goes over some,
under some,
through the middle of a few
that had no business being in the middle.
I pass the thread.
It snags.
I bring the sword down,
*tac*,
and the row is a mess,
a lump on one side
and a gap on the other
you could stick your pinky through.

My grandmother looks at it.

*Ay*, she says.
*Qué fea.*
How ugly.

And she laughs
until there are tears,
the door-hinge laugh going
up and up,
and Keyla comes running,
and Keyla laughs,
and my father comes out of the bedroom
in his undershirt
with his reading glasses on his head
and looks at the row
and says, very seriously,
*No. That's art.*

And then they're all laughing,
and I'm laughing,
and I lean too far back
and a thread pops
with a sound like a guitar string
in a sad movie,
and that makes it worse.

Hands

The problem is my hands.

My hands are good at one thing:
stopping things that come fast.
Catching. Smothering. Punching clear.
Big gloves. Big palms.
Fingers taped at the knuckles
from the jams.

The loom wants hands
that do the opposite.
Slow.
Small.
Hands that don't grab,
that guide.

*Tienes manos de portero*, my grandmother says.
You have goalkeeper hands.

She takes my right hand in hers
and turns it over,
looks at the palm,
the calluses from the gloves,
a cut from the chain-link at the park.

*Está bien*, she says.
*Las manos aprenden.*
Hands learn.

Monday, Locker Room

Yeferson Arroyo sees the thread around my wrist.
I'm still wearing it.
It's gray now.

*What's that, a friendship bracelet?*
*Who's your friend?*

*My grandmother*, I say.

*Aw.*

*She's teaching me to weave.*

There's a pause in the locker room
the length of a goal kick.

*Weaving's for girls*, somebody says.
Not Yeferson. Somebody at the back,
by the showers.
Easy to say from back there.

Rony's tying his cleats.
He doesn't look up.
He says, *His grandma could weave your face
into a rug, bro,*
and the room laughs
and moves on
the way rooms do,
and I owe him
two pupusas
and a thing I'll never say out loud.

What She Tells Me About My Grandfather

That night I ask her.
I ask in Spanish, but I ask.

*¿Los hombres tejen? En tu pueblo?*
Do men weave? In your town?

She sits back on her heels.

*Sí*, she says.
*Pero parados.*
Yes. But standing up.

On the big looms,
she tells me,
the wooden ones with pedals,
in a room with a dirt floor,
the men weave the cortes,
yards and yards,
the long skirt cloth,
the shuttle flying
back and forth so fast
you hear it more than see it,
*clac-clac-clac*,
like a ball knocked against a wall
by a kid who won't come in for dinner.

*Tu abuelo tejía cortes*, she says.
Your grandfather wove cortes.
Abuelo Pascual.
I never met him.
He's a name in pencil
on the margin of that graph paper,
with two dates under it in my mother's hand.

*¿Y en éste?* I ask,
and point at the backstrap.
And on this one?

She smiles,
a different smile than I've seen,
smaller, looking at the floor.

*Una vez.*
Once.

She was sick, she says,
with a fever,
the year my mother was born,
and there was a huipil she'd promised,
and my grandfather sat down
on the petate,
on the woven mat,
and put on her strap,
which didn't fit around him,
he had to add a rope,
and wove one row.

One.

*La más fea de todo el huipil*, she says.
The ugliest row in the whole huipil.

*¿Y la quitaste?*
And you took it out?

She looks at me like I've asked
whether she took the sun out of the sky.

*No.*
*La dejé.*
I left it.

Saturday, Away Game, Lafayette Park

Second half. One to one.
Their striker goes down in the box
like a tree in a storm
he planted himself.
The ref points to the spot.

Twelve yards.
Half a second.

I stand on my line.
I watch the hips.
And something happens
that has never happened before:
the hips don't look like hips.
They look like a warp.
Like threads lifted and threads down,
like a shed opening,
and I can see,
I can see where the gap is going to be,
where the thread is going to go through,
low, left, the side he's been opening
all game with his shoulder.

I go left.
Low.
My hand,
my goalkeeper hand,
my bad weaving hand,
gets there,
and the ball hits my palm
like a sword coming down,
*tac*,
and goes wide.

Rony picks me up off the grass
by the back of my jersey.
Coach Bermúdez, on the line,
doesn't yell.
He just writes something
in his little book.

I don't tell anybody what I saw.
Who would I tell?
How would I say it?
In which language?

Cumbre de Alaska

Why I Go

Because my cousin Wendy, who I've never met,
is getting married in January
in Chuwi Pinal,
and somebody from our side
has to stand in the courtyard
and be family.

Because my mother can't leave the sewing floor,
not in the season of spring blouses.
Because my father can't leave the kitchen
at the hotel downtown
where he cooks eggs for four hundred people
every morning before the sun.

Because Abuela has to go back anyway
for her papers and her house
and her sister
and the right gold thread,
and then come back with me
to finish the huipil.

Because my mother looks at me
across the kitchen table
the night she decides,
and says,
*Tú vas. Tú la cuidas.*
You go. You take care of her.

And my grandmother, at the loom,
says without turning around,
*Yo lo cuido a él.*
I'll take care of him.

And they're both right.

Packing

Gloves. Both pairs. Just in case.
Shin guards, no. Cleats, yes.
Two sweatshirts.
My mother adds a third.
My grandmother adds a fourth,
and a hat,
and a scarf she knitted,
and says: *Hace frío.*
It's cold.

I say it's Guatemala.
I say it's the tropics.
I say I've seen the pictures,
the beaches, the parrots.

She doesn't argue.
She just puts in a fifth sweatshirt
and zips the bag shut
over my objections
and the sweatshirt
both.

The Loom Travels

She rolls Marleny's panel
around the far stick,
the woven part inside,
the white warp outside,
and ties it in the striped shawl,
four cords,
four knots,
the same as when she came.

At the airport, at the scanner,
it goes through the X-ray
and the woman watching the screen
calls over a man,
and the man calls over another woman,
and they all look at the screen
and then at my grandmother,
who looks back at them
the way she looked at the people on the bus.

*It's a loom*, I say,
in English.
*For weaving.*
*She's my grandmother.*

The second woman unrolls one end
very carefully,
sees the birds,
and stops.
*Did she make this?*

*She's making it.*

The woman rolls it back up
better than she found it
and hands it over the counter
with both hands.

That's the first time
English has been useful
for anything that matters to me.

Five Hours

The plane is full of families
carrying boxes taped shut,
televisions, a bicycle wheel,
Christmas gifts from aunts
in shiny bags with tissue paper,
a baby in a car seat
going to meet her great-grandparents,
the baby dressed in white
with a bow on her head
so big it looks like it'll lift her off.

Out the window: ocean,
then clouds,
then, at the end,
green.
A green I didn't know existed.
Green with mountains folded into it,
like a blanket somebody kicked off in the night.

And then the volcanoes.
Three of them,
cones, perfect,
the kind a little kid draws,
one with a gray plume coming off the top
leaning sideways in the wind.

*Fuego*, my grandmother says,
leaning across me to see.
Fire.
*Siempre está bravo.*
He's always angry.

The Bus

From the capital
we take a bus that used to be
a school bus in the United States.
You can tell from the shape,
and from the faded words on the back
that say STOP when red lights flash.

But nobody would know it in Ohio now.
It's painted red and green and yellow,
stripes and stars and names,
and chrome horns on the roof,
and a sign above the windshield
that says the driver's mother's name.

A boy younger than me
hangs out the door as we move,
shouting, *¡Xela, Xela, Xela!*
and when somebody waves,
climbs up the ladder on the back
to tie their sack of onions to the roof
while the bus is still going.

Three people to a seat
made for two kids.
A woman with a bucket of
something wrapped in a cloth
that smells like warm tortillas.
A man asleep on my shoulder
before we leave the city.

The music is loud
and from my grandmother's childhood
or maybe somebody's.
A cumbia. Then another.
Then a man singing alone
with a guitar
about a bird
he let out of its cage.

Up

The road climbs.
That's all it does.
It climbs and turns
and climbs again,
and the driver passes trucks
on curves
I would not pass a shopping cart on,
and my grandmother sleeps
the whole time,
her head against the glass,
her hands crossed over the loom
in her lap.

Out the window:
fields of corn, dry now, brown,
the stalks standing in rows
like a team after a loss.
Little houses of adobe and cinderblock,
some painted, most not.
Kids with bundles of firewood
bigger than they are
walking on the edge of the road.
A woman in a red huipil
under a tree,
weaving,
her far stick tied to the trunk,
her strap around her back,
leaning,
and the bus goes past so fast
I see her for three seconds,
and I count them.

Cumbre de Alaska

Then the bus gets to the top
of everything.

Up here the fog is inside the trees.
The trees are pines,
tall, dark,
dripping,
and the road goes into a cloud
and the cloud goes into the bus
through the windows
that don't close all the way.

The cold comes in.
Not L.A. cold.
Not *wear a hoodie* cold.
A cold with teeth.
A cold that finds the inside of your ears.

I put on the first sweatshirt.
Then the second.
Then the hat.
My grandmother opens one eye
and sees me in the hat
and closes the eye
and smiles with her mouth shut.

*It's called Alaska*, the man next to me says,
awake now, in Spanish,
*la Cumbre de Alaska*,
and points out the window
at a sign I can barely read through the fog,
and laughs,
*because it's cold like Alaska,
¿me entiendes?*

I tell him I understand.
I put on the third sweatshirt.

Cuatro Caminos

The bus lets us off at a crossroads
where four roads meet
and fifty buses honk at once
and women sell oranges in plastic bags,
peeled in spirals,
and fried chicken in paper,
and bags of something called *chuchitos*,
little tamales in corn husk,
tied with a twist at the top
like a bag of candy.

My grandmother buys four
and hands me two
without asking if I'm hungry.

I am.
The masa is firm,
a little red,
a piece of chicken in the middle,
and the husk peels off warm
and the steam comes up in the cold air
and for a second I can't see.

The Last Ride

From Cuatro Caminos
a pickup truck with a metal frame
over the bed
for people to stand and hold on.

We stand.
My grandmother, seventy-one years old,
four foot ten,
stands in the back of a moving truck
on a dirt road with switchbacks
holding the metal bar
with one hand
and the loom with the other,
and doesn't sway.

I sway.
I hold on with both hands
and my knees go soft on the turns
like I'm waiting for a corner kick
from a team with tall forwards.

The road goes up through pine trees,
and past fields of something low and green,
and then over a ridge,
and the sun comes out sideways,
gold,
from under the clouds,
and there's a valley,
and in the valley a town:
roofs of tin and tile,
smoke from every house,
a low building painted a tired blue
that I know,
from the sheet on the wall on Eighth Street,
is the school.

*Ya*, my grandmother says.
Here.

And she says something else in K'iche',
short,
to the valley, not to me.

I don't need it translated.
I've heard my own voice
make that sound
coming home from practice
after a game we almost lost.

Comal

The House

Adobe walls the color of a paper bag,
thick as my arm is long.
A roof of clay tiles,
some new and orange,
some old and black with moss,
so the roof looks like a checkerboard
somebody stopped playing halfway.

A courtyard of packed earth,
swept every morning
into curved lines
by a broom made of twigs.
A peach tree, bare.
A clothesline with three huipiles on it,
drying stiff in the cold.
Chickens that stop and start
like they forgot something in the other room.
A dog the color of cinnamon toast
named Canelo,
who decides on the first night
that my feet are his.

Tía Abuela Chepa

My grandmother's sister is taller,
which isn't hard,
and louder,
which is.

She grabs my face with both hands
the first minute,
like you'd grab a ball
to see if it's pumped up,
and says a long sentence in K'iche'
right into it,
and waits.

I stand there.
Canelo stands there.

*No habla*, my grandmother says.
Again.
The same kind voice.
I'm starting to hate that voice.
Not her. The voice.

Tía Abuela Chepa says *ah*
and lets go of my face
and pats it twice, hard,
the way you pat a horse
that just lost a race
but tried.

Morning, Frost

I wake up in the dark
in five sweatshirts
and can't feel my nose.

Outside, the field below the house
is white.
Not snow.
Frost.
Every blade of grass furred with it,
every leaf of the cabbage in the garden
edged in white,
like somebody outlined the world
in salt.

My breath comes out in clouds.
Canelo's breath comes out in clouds.
Up the valley, past the pine ridge,
a mountain stands with its head
in a single pink cloud,
and smoke from forty kitchens
goes straight up
into air so still
I can hear a rooster
three houses down
clear his throat.

The Kitchen

The kitchen is its own small house,
across the courtyard,
black inside
from years and years of smoke.

The fire is on a raised hearth of brick and mud,
waist high,
three stones in it
and on the stones
a round clay griddle,
the comal,
wide as a bicycle wheel,
gray-white with a wash of cal,
the chalky lime,
so the tortillas won't stick.

Wendy is there,
my cousin, the bride,
twenty-two,
her hair in a towel,
in a fleece jacket over her huipil,
patting tortillas.

It's not like Rony's mother's pupusas.
It's slower.
It's thinner.
The ball of masa, yellow-white,
goes from palm to palm,
pat-pat, pat-pat,
turning a quarter each time,
spreading until it's a circle
thin enough to see the fire through,
and she lays it on the comal
with a little flick
and it puffs,
right in the middle,
like it's taking a breath.

The smell:
corn and cal and smoke and heat,
a smell like the inside
of a word I don't know yet.

Atol

Tía Abuela Chepa ladles something
from a black pot
into a clay cup
and puts it in my hands.

Atol.
Not the yellow corn one from the kermés.
This one is gray-white, plain,
thick as melted ice cream,
masa and water and a little sugar,
a stick of cinnamon floating in it
like a twig in a puddle.

I drink it.
It burns my tongue.
It goes all the way down
and spreads out in my chest
and down my arms
to my hands,
and for the first time since the Cumbre
I can feel my fingers.

Tía Abuela Chepa watches me drink.
She says one word.
*Utz?*

That one I have.

*Utz*, I say.

She looks at my grandmother.
My grandmother looks at the fire.
And Tía Abuela Chepa says something
that makes Wendy laugh so hard
she drops a tortilla on the floor
and Canelo eats it.

Black Beans

The beans have been in the clay pot
since before I woke up,
on the edge of the fire,
with an onion and a sprig of epazote
that smells like a garden
and a gas station at once.

They're black.
Really black, like the inside of a bag.
Shiny. Soft.
The broth thick and dark
as the coffee my grandmother makes.

We eat at a small table by the fire,
on low stools.
Beans, tortillas from the basket
wrapped in a cloth embroidered with roosters,
a little salt,
a chile that Wendy says *no es picante*
and is.

You tear the tortilla,
fold it into a scoop,
and that's your spoon.
That's your fork.
That's your plate, almost.

I eat seven tortillas.
I count.
Wendy counts too.
She tells everybody.

Jonatán

Jonatán is Wendy's little brother.
He's seven and missing
both front teeth
and doesn't care who knows it.

He follows me everywhere,
including the outhouse,
and talks to me in K'iche'
the whole time
like I'm going to suddenly understand
if he just keeps going.

On the second day he figures out
that I don't.

On the third day he decides
to fix it.

He points at the house.
*Ja.*
He points at the tortilla in my hand.
*Wa.*
He points at the water barrel.
*Ya'.*
He makes me say them.
He makes me say them again.
When I get *ya'* wrong
he laughs so hard he falls over
into a pile of corn husks,
and then he gets up and says it again,
slower,
with his hand on my jaw,
the way Coach puts a hand
on your shoulders
to fix your stance.

Seven years old.
Teaching me like I'm the little one.

I don't mind.
I mind less than I thought I would.

The School

On the fourth day my grandmother
walks me down the hill to the school.

Two rooms. Blue paint.
The door's locked for vacation,
but there's a window,
and through the window:
small desks,
a chalkboard with a drawing of a corn plant
and the words *las partes de la planta*,
and on the floor, in a row,
five plastic buckets.

And the roof.
Tin sheets, rusted orange at the edges,
held down with rocks on the outside,
and on the inside,
looking up,
light coming through
in little coins,
a sky of holes.

I take pictures.
Wide. Close.
The buckets.
The holes.
The chalkboard.
A boy's sweater left on a hook,
blue, with a hole in the elbow.

That night,
by the light of the one bulb in the house,
on my phone, with two bars,
I put the pictures
on the Committee's page,
the private one,
in the folder for the school,
with the date,
and under them I type,
in Spanish,
*Así está el techo hoy.*
This is how the roof is today.

By morning there are nineteen replies.
Don Cipriano. Doña Felipa.
A man in Houston.
A woman whose son is in the second room.
Even Hilario.
Hilario writes two words:
*Ya mero.*
Almost there.

What I Notice

Everyone here speaks it.
The old men by the store.
The girls on the path with their schoolbooks.
The man fixing the truck.
Babies, probably,
in whatever way babies speak.

It's not a secret language here.
It's not a Sunday-phone language.
It's not the language of the pause.
It's the language of *pass the salt*
and *the dog got out*
and *it's going to rain*.

That's what nobody told me.
That it would be so ordinary.
That you could be bored in it.
That you could argue about beans in it.

I lie under the wool blankets at night,
Canelo across my feet,
my grandmother breathing slow
on the other side of the room,
and I say the three words
from Jonatán into the dark,
*ja, wa, ya'*,
house, tortilla, water,
the first three things
anybody ever needed.

San Francisco El Alto, Friday

Before Light

We leave at four-thirty,
in the dark,
in the back of the same pickup,
with Tía Abuela Chepa
and three neighbors
and a crate of live chickens
who have opinions about it.

The stars up here are too many.
I've never seen so many.
In L.A. there are maybe nine,
and one of them is a plane.
Here they go all the way down
to the black line of the ridge,
packed tight,
white thread on a dark warp
somebody beat down hard
with the sword.

The cold comes through the five sweatshirts
like they're one.

The Hill

San Francisco El Alto
sits on the edge of a mountain
like a cat on the edge of a table,
and on Fridays
the whole town turns into a market,
every street,
every plaza,
every roof, almost.

By the time the sun comes up
over the valley
the streets are a river of people
going uphill,
women with baskets on their heads,
men with sacks on their backs
held by a strap across the forehead,
kids with bags of limes,
and everybody talking,
and everything for sale.

Inventory II

Tomatoes in pyramids.
Onions with the green tops still on,
tied in bunches like flowers.
Carrots, radishes, a white root as big as my leg.
Avocados in nets.
Little round potatoes, purple and gold.
Eggs in a basket, brown, with straw stuck to them.
Dried fish stacked flat like old books.
Plastic buckets in every color.
Machetes.
Mops.
A man selling only padlocks.
A woman selling only brooms
of the twig kind they use to sweep the courtyard.
Mountains of used clothes on tarps
from the United States,
from places like where I live,
a sweatshirt from a high school in Fresno,
a T-shirt for a 10K in Phoenix,
a baby onesie that says WORLD'S BEST NAP.

Somebody gave all that away.
Somebody here is going to wear it.
I don't know how I feel about that.
I feel about four ways.

The Animals

At the very top of the town,
past the big square,
there is a field where the animals are.

Cows, standing very still,
looking at nothing.
Pigs on ropes,
complaining.
Sheep in a pen,
gray-white and greasy,
the wool smelling like a wet sweater
left in a gym bag.
A horse that someone is riding
in circles to show how good it is.
A man with a turkey under each arm.
Goats. Chickens. A rabbit in a box.

Men in hats lean on a rail
and talk prices
in K'iche'
in low voices,
and every so often one of them laughs
or slaps his leg,
or two men shake hands
and something changes owners.

From up here you can see everything.
The whole valley, brown and green,
the pine ridges,
the town of Totonicapán somewhere off to the side,
Xela down there in the haze,
and past it,
standing up out of the morning
like it's the only thing that's real,
a volcano,
blue,
perfect,
with a cloud tied to its waist
like a sash.

*Santa María*, Tía Abuela Chepa says,
and points with her chin,
the way everyone here points.

The Textile Street

Then down,
down to the street of cloth.

Here the colors start shouting
from both sides.
Cortes in stacks as tall as me,
the blues, the blacks,
the tie-dyed patterns like smoke.
Huipiles on hangers,
from every town for a hundred miles,
I think,
the women walking by
reading them like name tags:
that one's from here,
that one's from there,
that one's somebody's cousin's.

And thread.
A whole row of thread stalls.
Sedalina in tubes, in hanks, in skeins,
reds and purples and greens and golds,
and acrylic yarn in neon colors
for the young women,
pink, lime green, electric blue,
colors my grandmother looks at
the way she looks at
a dog that might bite.

Buying the Gold

She needs gold.
For the last band of the neck square
and the rim of the shoulders.
She has some.
It isn't right.
She found out it isn't right
in L.A., at night, under the kitchen light,
and has been carrying the wrongness
around with her
like a pebble in her shoe
for a month.

At the fourth stall
she stops.
The woman there is young,
with a baby on her back in a shawl
and a cell phone in her hand
and three hundred skeins of thread
in a wooden case behind her.

My grandmother asks for gold.
The woman shows her six.
My grandmother shakes her head.
The woman shows her six more.
My grandmother picks one up,
holds it to the light,
which is better here, sharper,
then holds it against the purple
she brought from home in her shawl,
and then,
and this is the part I keep thinking about,
she hands it to me.

*¿Qué dices tú?*
What do you say?

I look at it.
Gold against purple.
It's like the jersey of a team
that wins a lot.
I look at the next one over,
a little darker,
a little more like the end of an afternoon.
I hold that one up next to the purple.

I can't say why.
It just doesn't shout.

My grandmother looks at the one I picked
for a long time.
Then she nods.

*Ése.*
That one.

She buys four skeins.
She lets me pay.
It's sixty quetzales.
It's the first money I ever spent
on anything that will last
longer than a pair of gloves.

The Stick Man

On the way out of the cloth street
there's an old man sitting on a crate
with a blanket spread in front of him,
and on the blanket:
sticks.

Loom sticks.
Smooth, pale, some dark,
in bundles tied with string,
long and short,
and swords, flat,
the edges worn soft with a knife.

My grandmother stops.
She talks to him in K'iche'.
He looks at me.
He looks at my hands.
He says something.
She says something.
He laughs, two notes, low,
and picks out a bundle
much shorter than hers,
the sticks no longer than my forearm,
and a sword the length of a ruler,
and puts them in my hands.

*Para una cinta*, my grandmother says.
For a band.
*Angosta.*
Narrow.

She pays him.
She doesn't let me pay for this one.

The Fork

On the way home,
walking the last part from the road
because the truck can't go up the hill,
the path splits under the pines.

One way goes down to the house,
the way we came every day.
The other goes up,
steeper,
into the trees,
the needles thick on it,
a little stone wall along one side
mostly fallen.

My grandmother stops at the split.
Tía Abuela Chepa stops too.

Neither of them says anything.
The pines move a little in the wind.
Somewhere up the path
a bird does a three-note call
and then a two-note answer.

I wait.
I'm good at waiting.
I'm a keeper.
I know what the moment before
feels like.

Then my grandmother turns
and takes the path down,
and Tía Abuela Chepa follows her,
and I follow them both,
and nobody says anything
until we're back at the house
and Canelo is barking,
and then Tía Abuela Chepa says,
in Spanish,
for me,
just one sentence,
while she puts the kettle on:

*Allá arriba vivíamos antes.*
We used to live up there, before.

And that's all.

What I Do with It

I don't ask.
I could.
I don't.

That night I take the graph paper
out of my mother's notebook,
the band for Marleny's neck,
and look at the five small people in pencil,
and the three white squares after them,
and I don't fill anything in.

I just look at the empty squares
for a long time.
I think about the path
going up into the trees,
the stone wall fallen down,
the bird and its answer.

I think about my grandmother's thumb
folded under,
on the couch,
in September,
under the kitchen light.

Then I fold the paper back along its crease
and pick up the short sticks
the old man sold her,
and hold them in my two hands
in the dark,
and count them,
by feel.
Six.
And the little sword.
Seven.

Juncia

Sacks

The day before the wedding
Jonatán wakes me by standing on my chest.

*¡Juncia!* he says,
which is Spanish,
which is the only Spanish word he says to me all week,
and drags me out of the blankets
by one foot.

Five of us,
cousins I'm still learning the names of,
with flour sacks,
up into the pines above the field,
not the path at the fork,
the other way,
the open way,
where the trees are young
and the ground under them
is a carpet of long needles,
brown and green,
soft, springy,
dry on top and damp underneath.

You kneel and scoop with your arms
like you're gathering up a ball
that has a thousand pieces.
You stuff the sack.
You stuff it again.
It never seems full.
Your hands come out sticky
and smelling like
the best thing I have ever smelled,
sap and cold and green,
a smell like the inside of a Christmas tree lot
on Alvarado in December,
times a hundred,
except here it isn't for sale.

Jonatán fills his sack halfway
and then gets in it.

The Floor

By noon the courtyard is ready to swallow it.

Swept. Wet down with buckets
so the dust stays down.
Then the women take the sacks
and scatter the needles,
handful by handful,
thrown out wide in an arc,
like somebody feeding a thousand chickens,
until the whole packed-earth floor of the courtyard
is green and brown and deep,
two inches, three,
and you walk on it
and it gives under your shoes
with a sound like a whisper
that's trying not to wake somebody.

They do the kitchen too.
They do the room where the tables will go.
They put a few handfuls on the windowsills.
Tía Abuela Chepa puts some in my hood
when I'm not looking.

The whole house smells like the forest
came down to visit
and decided to stay.

What I Learn About Weddings Here

There's a part in the morning
at the town office with papers and stamps
and a man in a tie,
and only the bride and groom and parents go.
I don't go.
I stay with the needles.

And then there's the part
that's the actual wedding,
the part everybody means
when they say wedding,
which is the afternoon, and the night,
and the courtyard,
and everybody.

Wendy

My cousin Wendy comes back from the town office
in a huipil I haven't seen,
white, with a band of red
and the same birds,
I think,
the same zigzags,
I think,
as Marleny's,
as my grandmother's,
only different too,
in a way I can see now
and couldn't see in September:
the birds face right, not left,
the zigzags are taller,
the red is a little more orange.

*¿Quién lo tejió?* I ask her.
Who wove it?

*Yo*, she says.
I did.
*Dos años.*
Two years.

And then she laughs and says,
*Bueno, mi mamá ayudó con el cuello.*
Well, my mom helped with the neck.

Fredy

The groom, Fredy, is from the next aldea over,
is twenty-five,
drives the pickup with the metal frame,
and has a laugh like a car that won't start.
He shakes my hand
and says I'm the goalkeeper from L.A.
like it's a title,
and asks me who I think
will win the league here,
and I don't know any of the teams,
and he tells me all of them,
and which one is cursed,
and why.

The Marimba, Again

A marimba comes in the back of a truck
in the late afternoon,
the frame and keys and legs,
four men with it,
and they set it up in the corner of the courtyard
on the pine needles,
and the needles crunch under the legs
like breakfast cereal,
and they start.

It's not the same as Eighth Street.
Up here the sound goes out
and doesn't hit a wall.
It goes over the courtyard
and over the field
and up the valley
and comes back off the ridge
a half-beat late,
so there's always a ghost marimba
playing behind the real one.

The low notes go into the ground.
I feel them through the needles,
through my shoes,
in my shins.

Food

A pot the size of an oil drum
over a fire in the courtyard,
caldo, beef soup,
with big pieces of corn on the cob
and chunks of pale green squash
called *güisquil*
and carrots and a bone
the size of my forearm.

Tamales, red ones in banana leaf,
like Doña Herminia's
but not,
and my grandmother says, *ahí está*,
there it is,
and I know she means
the thing that was missing,
and I still don't know what it is.

Tortillas in baskets.
Bottles of soda in crates,
the orange kind and the red kind.
A cake with white frosting
and two plastic doves on top.
Little cups of a hot fruit drink
with chunks of something floating in it,
apple maybe, and a prune,
that Jonatán tells me
I'm too young for
and drinks himself.

Dance

I don't dance.

That's what I tell Tía Abuela Chepa.
I tell her in Spanish.
I tell her with my hands.

She takes my hands anyway
and pulls me into the middle
of the pine needles,
where the old couples are going
side to side,
slow, shuffling,
the men with their hands behind their backs,
the women with their shawls,
everybody looking at their feet,
not because they don't know the steps
but because that's the steps.

I go side to side.
I step on her foot.
She steps on mine harder,
on purpose,
and the whole courtyard laughs,
and the marimba speeds up,
like it's laughing too.

My grandmother doesn't dance.
She sits on a bench by the kitchen
with her hands in her lap
and watches,
and when I look over
she's not laughing.
She's smiling,
but not laughing.
Like she's counting something.

Who Made It

Late, when the soup is gone
and the marimba is on break
and the stars are out again,
too many,
I remember my mother's folder.

I take out my phone.
I start with Wendy.
I take a picture of her huipil,
the front, the neck.
I type: *Wendy. Dos años. La mamá ayudó con el cuello.*

Then Tía Abuela Chepa's sister-in-law
sees what I'm doing
and comes over and stands
in front of me,
very straight,
in a huipil that's green and black,
and says, *tómame a mí*,
take me.
And then another woman.
And another.

They line up.
I'm not kidding.
On the pine needles,
under the one bulb on the kitchen wall,
eleven women in a line,
waiting for the goalkeeper from L.A.
to take a picture of their huipiles
and write down who made them
and when.

Some made their own.
Some say *mi mamá*.
One says *mi abuela* and holds up her arm
to show the sleeve is worn through at the elbow
and has been patched with a different red.
One says a name I don't catch,
and when I ask again,
she says it again,
slower,
and then says,
*ya no está*.
She's not here anymore.
And I type the name
the way she says it,
as close as I can,
and she looks at the screen
and nods.

The Last Night

The night before we leave
my grandmother sets up my warp.

Short sticks.
Seventy-two threads,
white,
she counts them out loud
and I count them with her,
in her numbers up to three
and in mine after that.

The far end she ties
to the post of the kitchen door,
the black post,
smoked dark from a hundred years
of tortillas.

She puts the strap around me.
It's a new strap.
She made it this week,
at night,
while I was asleep,
and it fits.

*Ahora sí*, she says.
Now, yes.

I lean back.
The threads go tight.
The post holds.
The kitchen smells like smoke and pine.
Canelo lies down across my feet
to make sure I don't go anywhere.

I weave four rows.
Bad ones.
I leave them.

Fifteen

Down

Coming back is faster.
Everything coming back is faster.
The pickup, the crossroads, the bus,
the cold pass, the fog in the pines,
the capital, the plane,
the ocean, the brown hills,
the gray sheet of the city
coming up under the wing
like a cloth somebody is shaking out.

Union Avenue smells like diesel
and somebody's carne asada
and the jacaranda on the corner
that isn't blooming yet.

My mother is on the sidewalk at five-twenty.
In her house sandals.
She holds me so long
the neighbor's dog stops barking
to see what's wrong.

February

The third panel is done.

My grandmother lays all three
side by side on the kitchen table,
on a clean sheet,
and for the first time
I see the whole thing
the way Marleny will wear it:
white, and the purple at the shoulders,
and the rim of gold,
the right gold,
and at the neck the square
of birds and zigzags,
so tight,
so full,
and somewhere inside it,
along two of the zigzags,
one strand of red
from a bug on a cactus
and one strand of blue
from a leaf that smelled like a bad egg,
spun by a woman I'll never meet
in a yard I've now stood in.

She sews the panels together
with a needle and a thread of the gold,
by hand,
a stitch that zigzags too,
so the seam isn't hiding.
It's part of it.

She cuts the hole for the neck.
I have to leave the room for that part.
I can't watch her
cut anything she made.

My Band

My band is on the bunk bed post now.
Seventy-two threads.
Two fingers wide.
Twenty-nine inches long so far.

It is not straight.
It's narrow at the start,
where my hands were scared,
then it gets wide in the middle,
where I relaxed too much,
then narrow again,
then it does a thing
where it leans to the left
for about three inches,
like it's trying to see around something.

Near the end there are birds.
Three.
Very small.
Not hers. Not her town's.
I didn't copy them.
She told me not to.
*Ésos son míos*, she said, about hers.
*Haz los tuyos.*
Those are mine.
Make yours.

So mine are just birds.
They face left, like hers.
One of them has a too-long neck.
I didn't do it on purpose.
My mother saw it
and had to sit down.

Practice for the Sentence

Every night for five weeks
I say it into the phone
to Jonatán,
on a video call that freezes
every time somebody in Chuwi Pinal
turns on a light.

Jonatán corrects me.
Jonatán is ruthless.
Jonatán laughs so hard
when I get the middle part wrong
that Wendy has to take the phone away from him.

Then I say it to my mother
on the bus down Seventh,
quietly,
with her lunch in my lap.
She nods.
She fixes one sound.
She looks out the window
at the bridal shops
for a long time.

I don't say it to my grandmother.
Not once.
That's the plan.

The Hall on Sixth Street

The quinceañera is in a rented hall on Sixth
with a disco ball
and a ceiling of fabric bunched
like the inside of a jewelry box.
The tables have purple cloths,
Marleny's purple,
and gold chairs
somebody's cousin rented
from a man in Huntington Park.

There's a DJ.
There's a cake as tall as Keyla.
There's a marimba,
the brothers from Eighth Street,
in the corner,
setting up their keys
next to the DJ's speakers,
the two of them eyeing each other
like goalkeepers at a shootout.

Marleny comes in
for the first part
in the gown,
the big one,
purple,
shiny,
a skirt so wide
two of her cousins have to steer it
through the door,
and everybody claps,
and she does the dance with her father,
and it's beautiful,
and I'm not going to lie,
I clap too.

The Change

Then, halfway through the night,
she disappears.

Tía Olga goes with her.
My grandmother goes with them.

The DJ stops.
The marimba brothers stand up.
The lights come up a little.

And Marleny comes back
in a corte,
dark blue,
wrapped and folded,
the faja around her waist,
red and yellow and green,
her great-grandmother Manuela's,
the one with the question mark,
and the huipil.

The huipil.

Under the hall lights
it's whiter than it was on our kitchen table.
The purple glows.
The gold is the right gold.
And at her neck, when she walks past my table,
close enough to hug,
I see them,
the two zigzags,
the red one and the blue one,
holding her.

The room makes a sound.
Not a clap.
Lower.
The sound people make
when something they thought was lost
walks into the room on its own feet.

The marimba starts.
Slow.
Marleny dances with her grandmother.
Side to side.
Looking at their feet.
Because that's the steps.

The Words

After the dance there are words.
That's what they call it.
*Las palabras.*
Her father, her godmother,
Don Cipriano for the Committee,
who talks about the roof,
which is finished,
which the teacher sent pictures of last week
to the private page,
the new tin bright as a mirror,
the five buckets stacked upside down
in a corner,
empty,
and everybody in the hall who's from Chuwi Pinal
cheers,
and Hilario cheers loudest,
and his wife has the cinta in her hair.

Then Tía Olga says the cousins will say something.
And the cousins look at me,
because I'm the oldest.

I shake my head.
Not into a microphone
nobody ever plugs in.
Not to a hall.
Keyla stands up instead
and tells everyone Marleny is the best cousin,
in Spanish and then in English,
and sits down to more applause
than Don Cipriano got.

When the marimba starts again
I cross the hall
to the family table,
where my grandmother sits
in the oatmeal sweater over her Sunday huipil,
her feet not touching the floor,
and I crouch beside her chair,
low, the way you crouch
at the near post,
and under the music,
to her and nobody else,
I say it.

What I Said

I said it in K'iche'.
All of it.
Eleven words, if you count the way Jonatán counts.
Fourteen, if you count the way my mother does.
I'm not going to write the K'iche' here,
because I'd spell it wrong,
and because it's hers,
and because it's mine,
and because it was meant
to be heard once,
by one person,
under a marimba,
and not read.

But here it is in English,
as close as I can get it:

*Grandmother, it is already night,
but good morning anyway;
thank you for putting the far end in my hands.
I didn't let go.
I'm holding it.*

And then one more word,
the one I already had,
the one I've had since I was small
and was too ashamed to use:

*Maltyox.*

Her

She didn't clap.
I knew she wouldn't.

She gave me the look
she gave the fifth red
in the shop on Alvarado,
and the gold I picked in the cold market,
and the ugliest row in the whole huipil,
the one my grandfather wove,
the one she left.

Then she said something back,
in K'iche',
not loud,
close to my ear,
and two women from Chuwi Pinal
at the next table,
who had heard anyway,
laughed and wiped their eyes,
and across the room Don Cipriano,
who couldn't have heard a thing,
took off his hat.

I understood five of the words.
Five.
I counted.
Out of maybe twenty.

That's five more than September.
That's one more than zero,
five times over.

My mother was crying too hard
to translate the rest.
Later, on the bus home, she did.
I'm keeping it.
It's not for here.

The Folder

That night, at the kitchen table,
my mother adds two pictures
to the folder with the huipiles.

The first: Marleny in the hall,
under the lights,
in the corte and the faja and the huipil.
She types:
*Huipil de quince años. Micaela Batz Chox. Para Marleny.
En el cuello, hilo de Manuela Chox.*

The second: a narrow band,
twenty-nine inches,
seventy-two threads,
crooked,
leaning left for three inches
like it's trying to see around something,
three small birds,
one with a too-long neck.

She hands me the laptop.
She lets me type it.

*Cinta. Josué Xiloj. 15 años.*

And under that,
because the box has room,
because the cursor blinks,
because it's true:

*Primera.*
First.