by Luna Dragon Mac-Williams
My grandma’s arms are soft, the skin pulled loose.
It is the color of almonds, or maybe more like honey.
Dripping gently,
and won’t mold back on like the way it was
when she was younger.
I used to try--when I was little--to pinch her skin tightly.
Not to hurt her, but more to see what it could have, would have,
looked like. Taut and stretched, reflecting the light,
a bead cut with little facets. When I touched her, soft and gentle, like this,
she’d laugh. A melding of birds twittering in trees with church bells below.
She used to be a model for watches and jewelry,
the old ones you see in television shows where women faint on sofas.
I found a photograph of her from those modeling days,
sepia tone like a coffee stain on the page of a book,
her jaw strong and eyes steadily looking somewhere off in the distance.
Her thick black hair is twisted high on her head,
her arms are smooth and muscular like they could
snap a grown man in half as if he was a coffee stirrer.
And they probably would.
She grew up on a rancho in México,
princess of the plains and mountains and nopales,
reina del rojo y verde y azul.
When she was twelve, her mother died and she became la doña,
the woman of the house. She tells me stories about cooking dinner,
her powerful yet young arms kneading the masa
to feed the hungry faces of her brothers and sisters.
She tells me of milking cows, wrestling with goats.
Can you imagine that! Wrestling with goats.
For fun! ¡Qué LOCURA!
My grandmother’s arms lifted a bus once, she tells me,
on one of her road trips with her dozens of siblings.
(Okay, maybe a dozen siblings.)
It fell off the dusty cooking sunburnt highway,
rolled down the side of the hill like I did as a kid to get dizzy.
She leapt out
and the spirit of God entered her, flooded her the way a river flows
when a dam busts, and allowed her to lift that big bus up.
And some of her siblings died that day,
but she says the arms of God are what saved the rest.
These arms, she lifts them to the sky.
Laying in the dew-kissed grass before the rain begins to fall again,
swaying her raised knees, murmuring, and I can’t catch it all.
A complex tapestry woven of Spanish and English tumbles
from her lips. Her arms outstretched.
Sandwiched between apartment buildings,
In the crevice of brick and gray and cold
How she must have done it back on her tierra,
In the expanse of the rolling fields.
I always wondered what she was doing.
It is strange, to see her welcome a rain so calmly.
Her arms held husbands, they held daughters and grandchildren.
And when they hold me, I feel it all swirling through my blood.
Her arms smell of cinnamon and rice, of masa from tortillas,
dusted and freckled with chamuscado like her skin,
of dried chiles, the juice staining her arms blood red when she makes mole,
sometimes slippery from SC Johnson or Gold Bond lotion after showers.
But her arms don’t waver, never ever, they don’t let go.
Her arms are in Los Baños, and mine are in Chicago.
But I feel them around me.
Sus brazos me abrazarán para siempre.
About the Author
Luna Dragon Mac-Williams is a poet, playwright, dancer, actor, zine editor, handmade jeweler, and arts educator that roots her work in radical compassion & joy. She teaches theater, writing, and their intersection with activism through After School Matters, a non-profit organization in Chicago. She is an undergraduate student at Wesleyan University, and a firm believer in the power of coffee, community care, house parties, and helping youth honor & share their personal narratives.
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