Mireya Gonzalez-Looby

Reliquary of Enamel and Salt

Mama Beatriz has my dad's baby teeth in a cabinet, in a saltshaker, in Pico Rivera.

A reliquary of enamel and salt: proof that a then-mouth learned our now-language before the world taught it to flinch.

Amarillo es yellow, hielo es ice, ice son ojos.

My abuela sang it, a bright loop to outrun winter.

I repeat it now like triage when the news crawls cold along the bottom of the screen and the helicopter's patient chew ripples our windowpanes.

Lincoln Heights at the end of summer:

bottlebrush shedding red filaments like cauterized nerves.

Noon lifts over Broadway, skillet-hot, cast iron left smoking.

At the stove the pan goes from gleam to black, and the heat writes the old lesson again:

proximity to whiteness is a limit that nears and never touches the line leans toward safety and is kept just off it.

Inside this math some of us are taught to breathe, 

some of us are asked to prove we deserve oxygen.

I learned the policy words in a room with high windows and shy light.

I could annotate belonging and still feel my lungs halt at two seconds in yoga class,

my breath kinked by a century.

Hear the anatomy of a raid: A zipper seals a backpack not coming home.

IDs fan across asphalt.

Plainclothes with contractor boots; a windbreaker that reads POLICE in peeling letters.

A janitor bins Missing and Manifestación flyers.

An administrative winter moves through a building of ghosts.

A school intercom clears its throat.

Fluorescents tremble.

Documents sweat inside plastic.

The hallway keeps the echo after boots leave.

A child stops using her name at roll call.

Avenue 26 waits like a throat.

The Arroyo Seco refuses to clot.

Cypress Park's fence line thinks in voltage.

You were told no sabo was safer, that unlearning could float you, that if you laughed first the room would not aim the joke. Our parents, faithful to a rumor of safety, bartered parts of themselves for a front yard not peppered with bullets, a ceremony where a soul gets notarized.

There are coyotes so thin the streetlights pass through them, and yet they cross the concrete river like ideas no policy can detain. We share the same city corridor: of heat and siren; a choreography of staying.

I submit a docket of heat: glass blooming to blades, a wrist jerked through noon, a child's breath counted to ten, a paper cup of melting ice water sweating on a cruiser, bottlebrush bleeding its little fires, a coyote ribboning a jurisdictional seam, the asymptote the line leans toward and never meets, hugging a jacaranda while pleading.

And still the house insists on stubborn mercies:

The kitchen table where the hands talk.

A houseplant that keeps trying, stubborn green.

Copies warm in the tray.

Cold water waiting on the counter.

Two pigeons clean each other under the freeway, minor sacrament.

The cast iron scrubbed, oiled, returned to use.

The fear is particular; it has corners and alleys and proper nouns.

The love is particular; it makes lunch and makes room on the couch for the trembling dog.

Jamás.

I write it on the glass with my breath.