Issue > Poetry

Gerardo Pacheco Matus

Gerardo Pacheco Matus, a Mayan Native, is the recipient of a fellowship from CantoMundo, the Joseph Henry Jackson Award and a Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Work-Study Scholarship. His poems and essays have appeared and are forthcoming from La Bloga, Spillway, Grantmakers in the Arts, Apricity Press, Amistad, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, El Tecolote, Cipactli, Poets Responding to SB1070, The Packinghouse Review and West Branch Wired.

I've Been Born a Thousand Nights

I've been born a thousand nights under the saguaros,
every night, my mother dies,
her eyes become too black & cold,
her thighs turn stiff like wooden boards,
the night claims her body,
as I crawl away into the vastness,
I'm still attached to my umbilical cord,
I smell the blood spilled over the sand,
I've been born a thousand nights thirsty & tired,
almost blind, with a cut tongue,
yet I manage to cry, "my mother
is dead under the saguaros;"