While the children watch wide-eyed, her husband shoves the gun barrel into my mother's mouth, finger on the trigger, For years she becomes a new Cipactli – rough thick skin, one hundred wide mouths of sharp white teeth gaping, always hungry. She is created in this moment from nothingness, the arch of her back a dousing rod finding divinity in the space between stars. When the world begins, her husband drives his foot into the dark soft skin of her womb, he pries her open, hands tearing flesh, and the earth springs fully formed from the wounds in her flesh, rivers flowing from their source in the rich copper of her blood.

    He creates thirteen heavens     from the shards of her skull.

  Or he calls her by name, his lessons a river of blood -- Huitzilopochtli cutting open sisters, brothers, their blood spreading slick, crimson across his knuckles, his angry hands ripping their flesh because his mother, breasts a ball of hummingbird feathers, had been raped. Later she becomes Xochitl, flowers in her hair, learning betrayal in the palms of pulque drunk hands, he holds her brittle body against stones, she is spread wide – after she is raped they blame wine, blame younger men, other women take her place. Like Mayahuel, her breasts bleeding thick honeyed sap as she nurses four hundred children, they grow strong in Xochitl’s ruins as she is cut apart while they watch. Afterward, exhausted and bloodied, she becomes a warm body lying – finger shaped bruises quietly filling with blood, red against russet thighs where she has been pried open. Her smile stretches sharp white teeth, lips tight   around the flared head of his gun.