Poem by Fernanda Olivares (Mexico)

Published in The Ofi Press issue 41

Poem Selected by Alberto Blanco as part of the Ofi Press/ YPN collaboration competition

Image: "Dead Piñata" by Chris Young

Mexico

I come from a place

where gasoline puddles rainbow on concrete;

a place with kumquat-colored tents

over marketplace stands.

I come from a place

like the paint palette of a child: haphazard, disastrous.

A tropical fiesta reigns the streets:

a vicious crescendo of violent strings and trumpets,

a never-ending celebration for

the millions born.

My home is where the nights

are flooded with streetlights

and drunken laughter that fills

the night air like the bellies of fireflies:

twinkling for a second

yet lasting for a lifetime.

This place, where everyone lives

with a little fragment of the sun within,

as though attempting to outflame the

candles in the church, lit for

the millions dead.

I come from a place full of little gifts,

like a piñata at a birthday party.

Although it’s also full of demons

(crawling, haunting, killing)

And though sunny are the skies

sometimes

I have rain in my heart.

I come from a place

where people carry their memories like charms on a bracelet,

a place where

the brain tends to be in a perennial street-fight with the heart.

This place,

where the line between chaos and the ordinary

becomes as blurry as my kaleidoscope reflection

as I glance at gasoline puddles that rainbow on concrete.