Scarlet Martini

Electricity lights up the sky, a poltergeist levitates the windows.
Sister Evelina runs across the street, straight from the fetal poinsettias.
Some discordant jazz blasts from a megaphone, across the citywide skylights.
Eclipses of candy-coated planets help me spy the night rider from above,
His jacket of fleshy-painted chrome threatening the wind to fly.
Rivers of blood are coursing down the street, where her body lays bleeding;
The hollowness of nitrogen tanks barreling the lanes between the lenses.
All night, all night, the city lights medicate the womb.
There she lays, covered in the stains of scavengers, driven into the sand of rain and ruin, beaten senseless by the vandals of Laredo, left for dead on a rotten highway by the church.
A catechism interrupted; faceless skeletons creeping through the clerestory, raising the
desert with gulleys of wine pouring through every orifice the nun withdrew.

O mother, my temple of flesh, my martyr of the ancient Malinche,
Tell me all the ways you were good to him, all the times you tried to understand.
You were stripped of your dignity, taken from your people,
Forced into motherhood on the shoulders of Eve and the despair of Mary.
When the Earth is finally ruled by reinas, my birth won't be meaningless.
I'll defend them behind churrigueresque walls, silent as apostles in chiaroscuro trenches,
erected from the blasted architecture of comatose Mexicas, who built this land out
of dust and gold.

Red azaleas decorate the courtyard, where she'd paint the night
With the candle wax that had dripped off his button-downed collar.
I recollect Dali painting Venus there, on both sides of his angular cheeks;
Two curving icons of the female form on either side of his masculine face,
Not exactly the most representative of mirages, but elegant nonetheless.
What remains unseen, cast into the shadows of that surreal boutique,
Are his jaws of brimstone chewing off the umbilical residue.
If reading is like dreaming, then take me away from these words;
Baptize my soul with the divinity of sleep.