Painting Their Portraits in Winter by Myriam Gurba

Author:Myriam Gurba
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manic D Press, Inc.

Tzintzuntzan

Like a great religion, my parents conceived me in the desert. Water, however, did serve as one of their earliest aphrodisiacs. Two years before my making, they drove to Michoacán, to honeymoon on the banks of Lake Pátzcuaro. On its shores, cattails rustled, and my parents slid together into a tight canoe that set sail for the island of Janitzio. Fat yellowthroats chirped at Mom and Dad. They could smell that they’d been doing it a lot. Fisherpeople were casting butterfly nets into the water. Dad peeped through his camera lens and snapped a picture of Mom smiling and wearing so much eyeliner it would’ve made Cleopatra jealous.

On shore, Mom and Dad ate whitefish with heads still attached. As their shadows grew thin and long, Mom and Dad’s bellbottoms swished towards the sun. Their flowing black and brown tresses blew as they hiked up Tzintzuntzan’s pyramids shaped like Bundt cakes.

Tzintzuntzan. Can you say it? Tzintzuntzan. It’s not as hard to say as Parangaricutirimícuaro. Parangaricutirimícuaro is near the ruins of Tzintzuntzan, but its ruins are crispier. Some of them are still under the volcano that Pompeii’d all over it.

Verbal archeologists suspect that Tzintzuntzan is onomatopoeic. Guess what it’s the sound of. Picture a hummingbird twerking. The sounds accompanying those sharp movements would be tzin, tzun, and tzan.

My lover and I lived in our own Tzintzuntzan, a roundish five-floor apartment building where the elevator would discriminate against us for being lesbians, refusing to open for us, and we’d have to hike the stone stairs to our lair. Hummingbirds never visited our Astroturf-lined balcony. Instead, pigeons flocked to it. Pigeon couples and threesomes canoodled on top of the air conditioner. Their claws scratched nasty bird sex rhythms into the rust. One psycho pigeon dove into the heating system through the roof and got stuck in a tube. She made dying pigeon sounds until she quieted.

We left that sexual drama downtown when we moved into our blue house. Starlings nest in its red tile roof. Raw peach babies screech for worms while moms sail overhead, on their way to forage in urban playgrounds and Cambodian refugees’ vegetable gardens. Brown feathers flutter and fall on our limestone porch. Chunklets of nest fall, too. Bits of down drizzle the century plant that blossoms into a bigger and bigger green star by our front steps.

Hummingbirds drop in for breakfast. I was watching one hovering inches above the dirt. His beak dipped into a Mexican sage’s purple inflorescence. My stomach growled. I was in the mood for Mexican food, too. Chorizo. I wanted chorizo but not a man’s.

I bent over and reached for our newspaper. I subscribe purely for the crossword puzzle. The hummingbird turned his head and made tiny eye contact. He darted towards our tallest tree, our guayaba, and sailed over its green heights, speeding down the street, over tagged apartments and double-parked cars flashing hazard lights. Pit bulls nobody is interested in spaying or neutering lounged in yards and driveways, waiting to be fed a baby of any race.

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