Monique Quintana – Capillaries Look Like Trees

Monique Quintana

Capillaries Look Like Trees

            For Carribean Fragoza

We weren’t Catholic, and I couldn’t have a quinceañera. My mom felt bad, so she told me she would take me on a trip anywhere I wanted to go, as long as it was in the continental United States because she could get a discount with her American Express Card. I asked her to take me to New Orleans because I enjoyed the architecture, and the offspring of Nosferatu lived there. In grad school, I wrote a rambling paper on the Grand Guignol and the grotesque body. In a side street on the French Quarter, the façade of a townhouse was scorched to tethers due to the filming of the fire scene where Louis and Claudia escape Lestat and flee on a sail ship to Europe. It had been over two years, and Warner Brothers still hadn’t sent anyone over to clean up their mess. I thought of you when they played the movie at the old Crest Theater in Downtown Fresno. There were brown kids like us crinkling candy wrappers, and they didn’t give a fuck and hushing their friends to silence when the movie started like they didn’t know what was going to happen in the first scene like they hadn’t seen it ten thousand times and knew all the lines.