Promise: October 17th, 2015, Mexico City

Sonya Wohletz

I.
I visited the Basilica of la Virgen de Guadalupe.
Your favorite advocation. It was your birthday.
The year was 2015. You had been gone
Four years already. I was alone. No one
Accompanied me there. The husband
I had married was no longer
My husband. I took the metro
From my rented room in Roma. I chewed
Pumpkin seeds, amaranth in honey. But
I wanted tortas, tlayudas, and swallowing
A new man instead. I told no one.

II.
How crooked and fragile the whole
City in its wide mouth seeming. Pink stone and
Planet tooth. Felsic laws of time and gravity
Broke across our shame and equity alike.
Unhinged the bud from broken stem, yet somehow sure
Of itself in boulevards and buried water,
Drilling history through its mandible.
Exhales ochre smoke
Into a butterfly
Sky.

III.
I loved that Daughter.
The sacred being vanquished on the
Plinth of time, shriveled breasts
And loose belly, bundled in her snake girdle
And the ringing bells of a broken church.
A gentle rain fell on us
Like feather down.

IV.
After lapping the templo mayor thrice and
Failing to gain entry to the National Palace
Where the most famous Rivera murals
Live in captive solidarity, I began to
Understand all of the songs I’d ever loved.

V.
On the city metro women
Can sit separately from the men.
It is easy to arrive at Tepeyac
From anywhere in the world, even if
You are a woman.

VI.
When
My turn came
I walked towards grief,
Purchasing t-shirts, bracelets, and
Figurines that I carried with me
Along the way for protection. I climbed
Up the stone roads to the highest point,
The origin story in its shroud of bloody petals.
I took a long indulgent piss and
Then washed my face in a dirty sink.
The woman to my right scoffs at me,
And I don’t want to say I know
Why she does.

VII.
I visited the baptistry and
The old Basilica museum. At this time
I was in graduate school studying colonial
Art. I was moved by what I saw, mostly
By a Villalpando that I’d never
Seen before—a solitary Santa Barbara
Frozen oil beside a stone well,
Quiet and soft in the Great
Green Poussin strokes
Of cloud forest.

VIII.
I attended the cult.
I took only the Body.
I purchased yellow roses.
I stepped onto a familiar locomotion
That moved us all a little closer to the center of the
Earth.

VIIII.
We were caught there
Between the sleek lathes of modernism
And the feathered speech
Of ancient understanding.
We were moved
And then moved along,
The pressing crowd and us.
I left the roses below,
Amid a catastrophe of promises.

VI.
I wrote post-cards to your friend Mary.
I used simple words and said next to nothing.
I flew away the next day.

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Author’s Note: I wrote this poem about a trip I took to Mexico City to memorialize my mother who had died in 2011. My mother, although not a strict adherent to religious doctrine, had a deep appreciation for the artistic legacy and aesthetic of the Catholic Church. I share in this fascination of hers. The history of Catholicism in the Americas is complex, amorphous, and traumatic; I wanted to express something of how my own individual grief occupies similarly escapes easy explanation. The Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Tepeyac is now one of the largest pilgrimage sites in the world. And although my mother’s death, in many ways, devastated me, I felt comforted as part of a community that spans geographies, cultures, and generations when I visited this place. Grief is a journey, a pilgrimage that unites the bereaved—our regrets, flaws, memories—in the nexus of the physical and the mythic. We can release ourselves from time-bound narratives through this liminal procession. This poem reflects the intersection of my perceptions as related to my place as both subject and agent of this unfolding story, which includes both the fabric of the mundane, as well as the rituals of sacrifice, lamentation, and desire.

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Sonya’s work has appeared in Latin American Literary Review, Sterling Clack Clack, Ghost City Press, and others. Her interests include tarot, bats, the weather; letters, and numbers.