My Great-Grandmother’s Egg Thief
was never officially charged though she considered her son’s
wife prime suspect Rita my great-grandmother’s
name never trusted her daughter-in-law & maybe
rightfully so Mamachela’s hazel eyes & light skin as myth goes
two reasons a man would let his Trojan horse loose
though in this case after the third child died she left
my grandfather Jorge to raise four more found another
home with a soldier a newfound pariah status which is why
when I took a drama class at the University of Chicago
& we were studying Ibsen’s A Doll’s House the renowned
British actor who co-taught the course was appalled when I said
Nora still had a future to look forward to even in the 19th
century surely white feminism never met the Latinas in my family
& few
things match the warmth of an egg right after it’s been laid
During summer eggshells babble on the ground
the evidence of a predator’s mischief a branch-buttressed
nest’s disposal or a bird content with gravity’s assignment A man
was jailed four times for stealing 700 rare wild bird eggs:
osprey golden eagle red kites peregrine falcons merlins
redwings avocet In his residence / maps climbing
equipment camouflage clothes miniscule holes drilled
on the shells Thou shalt not steal Thou shalt not covet
thy neighbor’s wife Not the contents but the collectible casings
How do you return everything you’ve stolen
from us?
Control the thing you most love at the root of your addiction
Folks camped outside Rita’s house to have their tarot cards
read before she aged & forgot who she was forgot how to bathe
reeked of piss chicken manure eau de cologne To schedule
a consultation men rolled from under cars stars in their own
Cantinflas films greasy hair crème fraiche in the corners
of their mouths the women gossiped incredulously after flattening
corn on clay ovens for their patrones matriarching all the ways
we’d outlast the policies of the rich
The thefts of Rita’s
favorite hen’s brown eggs the source of fantastical tales
populated by ghostly headless horsemen who abducted
children if they ran away from home or women
pregnant with black-magicked frogs or that man with a limp
deemed hideous from false accruement During sessions
I’d climb the long vines of Rita’s backyard tree
swing eight feet from the ground with the visitors’ children
one of us would plunge rip a new skirt a striped shirt
passed down three generations Our mothers would scare us
by paying my great-grandmother handsomely for a remedy
to exile our demons once and for all Leave them alone
she'd yell at them They're just kids!
Years later I think about
Rita’s backyard the trees that once swiveled their branches
near the ground It’s none of your business what I do with my life
I hear Rita say— daughter of an indigenous woman
& a man who like most men in my family left his breath
on everything we call mirror or past a man who tried
to rape Mamachela his daughter-in-law some say he did
Rita— who bought land with her own savings a rare feat
for a woman in those days in a country where women
with the simple dyeing of their hair can get mistaken
with a gang’s affiliation lose their heads Rita— who lost
most of that land to the government on which Tegucigalpa’s
airport was built
which means that in the lines of my wide
nose my plump ears my dense lips i bear the burden
of every arrival every departure my great-grandmother
who resisted losing her memory but lost it anyway
as her son lost his kicked in the bath spat out the spoon
concocted spells so potent indigenous secrets mixed
with loss which sojourn parallel the strength of a thousand
stolen acres in her the rest of us are still trying to figure out
why she shakes our houses at night when we all stood there
in silence watching her track the bandit’s clues not knowing
all of us were stealing her eggs all of us hungering for love
Copyright © 2018 Roy G. Guzmán. This poem originally appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review. Used with permission of the author.