Natalia Treviño

The child stands in the water near a wall, 

a wall made of leaves, 

a green and yellow exhale growing out of the water—

shimmers, branches, sunned, bare 

twigs poking out like small, dark fingers, 

a thicket blocking the sunlight 

from the water so that her feet               disappear. 

Papa, llevame,             cargame. 

But her father wants to teach her to swim.

Hold your breath.           Kick like a frog, he says. 

One yellow leaf moves,           the green leaves do not.

The wind is confused about what it can move. 

The yellow leaves must be made 

of another kind of skin. 

Tiny drops, water marbles drizzle down 

the stubbled terrain of his Saturday morning face,

his swim face, dia de campo face. Rivulets 

run down his neck, burrow between 

the hairlines on his chest.

A turtle climbs out of the water, 

its eyes tired, 

maybe mean. 

                         Does it bite, Dad? 

                                                   Do not be afraid.

One of the yellow leaves opens and closes like a book, 

and inside, she sees a dark bug, antennae, 

a face twitching, yellow eye bumps, 

and the child understands that the leaf had never been a leaf.

She does not know the word for butterfly yet, 

or mariposa. Hundreds, maybe thousands of yellows

clapping, opening, closing. 

Her father holds his wet hand up and points. 

A butterfly lands near the end of his finger, 

and another on the fat under his thumb. 

They are thirsty, he says, and they are calm 

like the wafer of sun                                           is also calm. 

And the game becomes for the butterflies 

to land on her finger, one at a time.

Years later, poets sit side by side on a rock writing poems 

that speak of their old tongue, the one taken from them, 

the one that flies out of the end of a wild pink pen, 

the one they reclaim in the shade 

under a family of encinos, 

the one that reminds them how their mouth 

and throat opened in unison once 

to swallow, to tug in a channel of liquid, of food

pulled it in like an undertow when the language of the mouth 

was all muscle, funnel, and cry,

pulling in the answer to all of the endless thirsts.

The poets remember a time when they were not human 

or thinking. And one poet lifts his pen and asks the other, 

do you remember your father? 

And the other poet becomes weightless. 

                                                  Does this explain why a fly

Has transparent wings, to disappear more quickly?

One day, a woman tells the poet that the plain yellow

butterfly she had seen as a child, the one 

that follows the Monarch en Mexico, has a name: 

                                                Cloudless Sulphur the woman sings, 

         Yes, but what do they call it en Mexico, she wants to know.

There was no one to ask. 

She remembers she once had a father 

who taught her to swim like a frog 

and examine bird wings, smoke rising from his pipe,

smoke that magically danced out of a pinprick of a hole 

on the side of his face, the irregular rings of trees. 

He showed her the broken limbs of pink coral 

                                                        on a necklace he had given her. 

This is what beauty is, he said, 

                                                       the imperfections.

Do the butterflies remember their father too, she wonders. 

Do they remember        being 

a pulp of liquid 

                    after they were born?