By Ariana Krieger
My Abuelita’s Lote
My Abuelita’s lote is one whizzing carretera away from a beach. You used to be able to see the ocean from her second-floor balcony, built up by stilts and cinder blocks as money came from El Norte.
My Abuelita’s lote used to have shrubs and chickens, and mountains I made of sea shells, before the store fronts were built up on the block. We would cross it at just the right time, led by Canela, that remarkably calm dog with a majestic brown coat who always knew exactly when to cross. Even though Abuelita kicked her away from the lote the first few weeks, Canela kept coming back, circling around my Abuelita, calming her nervios with each wag of her tail. Canela would lead us all down the barren slippery cliffs on the other side of the carretera to our own private beach. Abuelita would kick up a syllabic storm of complaints, condemnations and conspiracies hurled with each step down the cliff. We would play for hours with strangely shaped sticks, chasing crabs and sea anemones while Canela watched from the shade. Until even Abuelita would laugh with us, and sometimes fireworks out of her purse, setting them off into the open sky.
Now the beach is fenced off and costs 50 pesos to enter. Touristy cafes and a yoga center built on the cliffs, and Abuelita is gone. But I like to think perhaps Canela, calm Canela, still goes up to the lote’s gate sometimes, looking for the woman she took in years ago, wagging her tail in a way that says, “Doña Amparo, vámonos a caminar por la playa. El aire te hará bien.”
Sister
(based on Popol Vuh)
If you were kneaded from the same masa as me
One of us may not make it out of our city alive
And the other would survive on scraps of dampened nixtamal
What lurks behind the stove is of no consequence
And yet that’s where myth would have left us
Bursting out of the oven, cracking on the second try
The question: if our kneaders, or breeders, had known
what they were doing, who might we have become?
If handled gentler, let to rise slower,
But of course there is no answer in the fallen corn husks
Or personality profiles or astrological charts or DNA tests,
No proxy lineage can protect us from perplexity
When they mashed up our masa
They promised no such thing
Instead, they demanded we harden ourselves
And sometimes I still wake up solidified unable to breathe
Ariana Leon Krieger is a bilingual writer from San Diego, California, where she developed a keen awareness of borders—linguistic, cultural, and religious. Her upbringing and experiences in both the U.S. and Mexico inform her recently completed collection of essays and poems. She is based in Jersey City and teaches at New Jersey City University and Lehman College. Her work has been published in the Accentos Review and the Harpy Hybrid Review.