Holy Heat, Semana Santa Spa.
Two words you need to at the end of the poem--
petate and pop.
Both mean mat as in what you lay on a floor or a grid.
Petate is mat in Spanish, and Nahua pop is mat in Maya.
Holy Heat.
At the table in the Queens Korean spa restaurant
during Easter spring break, Ma was remembering Semana Santa
in Honduras, how they couldn't do anything from Wednesday
to Friday because they were remembering how Christ suffered
in this time, how he was captured, how he was crucified.
They couldn't even pick up a broom
to perform the cleaning penance they enjoyed so well.
They sat there in the heat with the memory of an old story.
From the table, she watched amazed, all these people,
including herself now, who didn't
stop all they were doing during the days Christ suffered.
I asked her what about before Christ, what did they do then,
and she remembered the little bit of school she had where they
told her about el puesto del sol, the position of the sun,
and un dios de maíz, a god of corn.
I've never heard her remember a God that wasn't Christ.
The kitchen called our number, and I picked up our order
from the counter.
After we ate, we went to sweat in the rooms of gold and jade.
"All I think about is your father here," she said.
Because he worked with stones and gems, I answered in my head,
because we were the Maya, and jade was our gold, I imagined.
"Para los riñones," she went on, these stones, this heat
might have helped the kidneys that failed him,
but he wouldn't take care, get air, leave the house,
come to a place like this, give his body some relief.
She sat up in the domed sauna, eyes closed,
belly unfolding beneath her, and I
saw that she looked like my brother,
that he looked like her, that I looked
like them, that we are this tribe of bellies unfolding.
She sat up in the jade room, sweat
dripping out memory, vessel emptying on a straw mat, petate,
pop, mat in the matrix of time.
One position in the universe, ancients charting a figure
on a mat as a point on a grid, one point in a domed hut
remembering, releasing.