Coyolxauhqui

by Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas

It started with a bang.
The rumble of machines.
      bang bang bang
Then, electric cables
            light
                  bang
Deep they dug —legs, blue feathers.
Deep they worked —blood, her torso.
Deep she was awoken —two arms, bells.
Dismembered goddess.

                  Her head: the Moon.
      [la cabeza / Coyolxauhqui's
con cascabeles / rattled
      de Coyolxauhqui / head]

Southern stars, her siblings,
began to fall.
Observatorio metro station:
      400 meteors
            bang
                  bang
                        bang
      light
[fuego emplumado / feathered fire]

He came afterwards: a fully armoured feathered-Sun
re-born from the innermost depths of
the Tacubaya metro station
—earth once impregnated by feathers—.
      in cuautli in ocelotl
Huitzilopochtli, the fratricidal warrior,
ascending
from the orange snake lair.

                  Blood on the stairs of the Zócalo metro station.
                  [Sangre en las escaleras del Templo Mayor /
                  blood on the stairs of Templo Mayor]
Battle.

Her body reaches terminal velocity,
ends up in pieces
      —again—
as far as Tláhuac, El Rosario, Pantitlán.
Her head, in flames,
flees Mexico City [Tenochtitlán],
pierces the atmosphere.
                  feathered silver light
She becomes the Moon.
      Again.

It ends like an ultraist poem:
aai o aaiio a o a aaaiiiiiiiia
      aaaiiia

---

Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas is Mexican and recently moved with her fiancé and three cats to Calimaya, a little town near an extinct volcano and not so far from Mexico City. She writes mostly in Spanish, but sometimes she tries to create stories with her broken/robotic English. Her work has appeared in anthologies like The Apex Book of World SF 3, Future Lovecraft and Mexican SF webzines like Penumbria. She can be found online at NellyGeraldine.com and on Twitter as @kitsune_ng

Photography: adapted from Fire your guns!, by Emilio Küffer.