Sarah A. Chavez

Halfbreed Helene’s Greatest Blaspheme

Halfbreed Helene knows that she has a mother and a father and a sister,
but sometimes, 
                           sometimes, 
                                        (most times),
                                                       she feels as if she sprang pre-pubescent 
from the dry knot of a drought-parched poplar: always thirsty, unsure
of which direction she should lean. She hears her peers thank their abuelas
for strength, thank their mamis for cooking, thank their fathers for bread on the table. 

There was no bread, no table. Her home had roof yes, had walls thin as promises,
fragile as the leaves stitched together with toothpicks she and her hermana (who hasn’t
called her back for two years) used to make. Sun-kissed and cross-legged in the grass,
constructing casitas for their barbies in a corner of the crab grass yard. The wind
that was brief and infrequent howled through and Barbie’s exposure seemed insurmountable. 

Without my ancestors, I would be nothing, H hears others say. Without my ancestors, I guess
I wouldn’t be breathing, she thinks. That much is true (and True), though the little breath
she has gets knocked out and used up in ways she doesn’t understand. Obviously, she isn’t alone.
Not truly. And she knows she appears ungrateful when a thank you doesn’t drop from her lips
when something good happens. No thank god or goddess or ancestor spirits. No thank amiga 

or comunidad. She just nods. Recognition that a thing she worked hard for has manifested.
Most times it doesn’t. So in those glowing moments in which decorum requires gratitude, her
mind is too busy trying to understand what aligned this time to make the something good
happen, how can she replicate it so people stop pretending like it was a lucky gift
or something stolen. 

Sarah A. Chavez

Four Hours After You Died

I dyed my hair purple. 
I would have done it
anyway, but maybe
less methodical, with
music and dancing under
the line of bare bulbs
in the bathroom of this
house you didn’t get 
the chance to step in. 

I dyed my hair purple,
our shared favorite color.
Each rinsed strand glints
violet after drying.
You’d think it was too dark.
I think it looks lonely—

I look for purple 
nail polish, pulling out
cheek brushes never used
and cotton swabs and combs
from the cabinet under
the sink. I find it, swipe 
hastily at fingers and toes (I’ve
never been good at 
application). 

That looks unfinished too,
So I find purple socks
with skull heads on the ankles.
Then a purple blouse 
you gave me from your
vieja closet, when all
the clothes you loved
started to hang loose
from the bones of your
shoulders. The print,
palm-sized plum flowers 
with gold trim and pollen 
centers. Something is

incomplete still. I dig out
mauve pants. A lavender
jacket. I’m so cold it’s 
as if I were naked. I
crawl into the linen closet
for that lilac embroidered
blanket from the flea market,
find it and wrap myself
as if that could melt 
the winter in my bones, 
like the color might absorb me, 
like if I cover my face, the 
whole of me will 
become an organic purple
phosphorescent beacon
glowing glowing glowing
so bright my violet-shaded
cocoon might be visible 
from space (from heaven?)
and you’d be able to see 
clear the warm sadness 
your leaving left.