Samuel Temblador

Necrophagous Poets

Drops of blood paint the path of my strategic retreat through the fading half-light. The shadow of the earth is eating the moon’s visage, and Coyolxauhqui’s bone white face begins to bleed as I view it from an interstice beneath the 110 freeway; the great concrete spine of the city of angels runs titanically through my home town of south central. 

In the distance, the silvery glint of a blade carves moonlight through the darkness. Los poetas necrófagos stalk me through the shadows. Feeling light headed. Ended up here because I’m more a creature of the margins than a writer. The disillusioned dream of the young journalist I left buried in the city that never sleeps, still haunts me. But abuela always said if the world of the living ever failed me, I'd always have our ancestral oficio. Been a part-time demon hunting curanderx for the last three years. (i.e. a dirty realist without a day job, collecting the guild’s demon bounties to get by). 

The snickers of my pursuers bring me sharply back into the present; time and again, I’ve staked them out at community poetry nights, parks after sunset, the foothills. Have caught them glaring on occasion, from tenebrous nooks across the blighted urban sprawl. 

Through the gash in my palm, eldritch chanting emerges from somewhere beyond the veil of flesh; it is the sonic curse of their presence, heard only by those they’ve marked. Gazing up from my hiding place, the concrete slab of the highway howls overhead. The entire locale evokes a massive half open sarcophagus. Its parallel stone roof and rock bottom are all grit and graffiti. Across my line of sight, several shadow people slide out from behind and across highway columns. A primordial band of street coyotls, this is but one form of the necrophagous ones. I share all the points on their compass of cardinal creation, vanity, instinct, destruction.  

Hearing the muffled verses approach, I go deathly still. One scans the air for me. I stifle  every breath. 

“Iuctli, little sibling / I scent the seed of despair / upon thy member / a bundle of entrails are you and your kind / upon my palm / they all eventually slide / like handfuls of red dahlias / through my fingers / Iuctli, be warned / the vain struggle of your aromatic mortality / exposed,” says the Tzitzimeh maiden through glossy, violet lips. 

She glows with a spectral, pinkish aura. Her inscrutable visage lurks beneath an iron helm in the shape of a heart. At the jagged opening running from her corpse purple nose to her chin, scarlet tears streak endlessly. And through this heart shaped shell, a single eye catches the light from the velas sprouting from her shoulders. A black rosary stretches across the violent sheen of the mask in the moonlight. 

Just then, the lunar eclipse becomes total and with it, all hope of escape. Now, Coyolxauhqui is wearing a rust red halo. Los poetas necrófagos are thorns in her celestial crown. From my nook, I spy them through the dense crimson light: most are beady sockets set in mummy leather faces, mouths sewn shut. 

“Anda, show yourself little rabbit,” says their emissary Camila Dulcamara, a self proclaimed slum goth and the only established indie publisher in this marginalized neck of the woods. Sent her my collection of forlorn poems dedicated to Coyolxauhqui years ago; never imagined my insignificant poetic ambitions would serve me as demon bait someday.  

Camila is the chosen one of this cult of low lives long since reborn as inhumans. Eternal rebel youths trapped in ever decomposing flesh, they fill the great void of their artistic vanity with a nihilistic song. I’ve embraced my own just enough to draw them; my hands are mummifying before my eyes. I still crave wild artistic success but not at all costs.   

Camila, eyes dilated, slips through the shadows pantomiming ballerina hands in the air, completely entranced. Slowly and jerkily, she twirls and sashays forth, moon blade in hand. 

“Don’t be coy, conejita. The world's ending, didn't you hear? It’s your destiny to kiss my cross of knives. With it, you'll finally speak with Coyolxauhqui and bring the definitive triumph of spirit over matter. Your poems have shown me everything!,” she declares in a disturbingly rapturous tone.

“You’re being manipulated, Camila marioneta,” I say, steeling myself.“The only thing in those damn poems is my own vain portrait, the shit upon which these condenados feed. Let this go on further, and you’ll be devoured like the rest."

“None of that matters now, silly rabbit,” she responds. “To hear the moon’s song, that is everything! So, just do it, hija de tu chingada madre tierra. Help us achieve the master work of all true poets. Or fuck! Do you not want to see the gods?!”

“For the last time, you're being used little puppet. I’m just as  vain as you but these hellish shades of your acquaintance are all out of proportion… the word is balance,” I say, hearing the faintest tone of two spirited Ometeotl in my voice.

“You’re going to help us open the gate, coneja cabrona,” she says, her voice trailed by a demonic undertone.”You cannot deny destiny!” Her voice snipes me from the other side of the column I’ve been hiding behind. 

I jump into the open, obsidian mirror in hand; just before the blade bites my heart, I bring it to her face. A gangrenous, mummy dry rostro is staring back at her, cataracted eyes peering from macabre sockets. She screeches horrifically. 

“Please, I know it's hard. But look in the mirror. Say the words…live. Nican Nicatcapol…Quickly, no te queda de otra,” I say diplomatically. 

“Fuck you!,” she responds, striking the mirror. It shatters into smoking shards. Before she takes another step, her body contorts with a series of abrupt cracks into the dismembered shape of Coyolxauhqui herself. 

“Cayepa?!!,” the moon goddess' question thunders hideously through the vaulted underpass. 

 Los necrófagos point solemn fingers, one by one, at Camila. As I reach forward, she is gnashed between great, spectral stone teeth; my hand goes resignedly with her toward Mictlán. The agony reminds me: myth is a many toothed spiral, upon which all vanities break.