For Gloria Anzaldúa (in the vein of "Your Body Figured")

You were always a precocious little girl.

Bleeding before your time, red where only other colors should be.
Secret rags that you washed and hung on a low cactus, chest bound tight as if you were trying to shove everything back inside of yourself.

Did you ever feel special encased in those girdles?
Did you feel snug and protected, cradled like a little doll inside a chrysalis?
Or did you feel trapped, squeezed inside a too-small cocoon that was made by someone else—your mother-moth?

Stunted growth at twelve only affected your body; everything else kept expanding, including the pain. It made you dissociate—thoughts carried off somewhere else while your nerves screamed, energy coursing to your brain, telling you to do something. Years later, fibroids and fevers, body pulsating and rocking and drowning all at the same time. Everything floating out of you, concrete reality left behind, in a twist of fate, the tighter the pain and the girdles and the world coiled around you.

You were always a spiritual person.

Your name—a chant, a praise raised as a glory to whom?
In life, to your heritage: mestiza, a borderlands calling for a new consciousness.
Maybe now that you’re somewhere else you’d say the earth, warmed with dripping blood that haunted you for so long, blood that shamed parts of your body into hiding.

Your name made you a bearer of good news, a daughter of Eve and angels, unholy union that brought us all closer to peace through gospel-song. You would not be socialized into silence; you would rebel and write and claw at the privilege, the ground, and the barbed-wire fences meant to separate us. You focused on the gaps and the connections that you could create there, fashioned out of your own flesh, the bones in your back, a stairway to heaven constructed out of ribs. Your back, broken and rebuilt as a bridge for others to cross. Your innards scooped out to deal with the pain and the lumps, leaving a hole where you could finally live, where others could rest from the world. Dark and cavernous, you dove inside to write from the core. Yet there was still pain, its epicenters on your skin, drawn all over your body like tiny targets.

You were as groundbreaking as an earthquake.

They called you traitor, a cultural betrayer, for rocking the boat and exposing the rot, the soft underbelly—so pale from being hidden from the light. You knew what you were doing.

You knew you were born a queer.