Bank

after Gabriela Mistral

I

Pomegranates were nameless once, as was I. I floated there in my mother’s womb, unbeknownst to her until a morning when blood rushed out. She stood shocked, in pain, in sorrow, grieving the being inside of her. But I was not lost. It is common, the doctors said. But there is still a baby inside of me, she said. It is common to think this, the doctors repeated. Please check, she begged. At the ultrasound, the steady womppp-bommppp of my golden sweet heart. Still nameless, but undeniable. In this nameless country, am I going to die? The fear permeated my membranes, the jelly around me. Parents-in-law and parents-in-blood said in their hardest voice: don’t do this. This one is special, my mother quieted them. She, in a different country from which she was grown. The tight skin over juicy bulbs of flesh, this pomegranate and me, plucked from a tree, devoured, each seed a year of my life. Am I going to die, I am going to die, but is it today? Is it in my sleep? If it’s soon will I have mattered? The juicy river down their lips, speaking my name, plump with perfection.

All ten toes, they coo, and when you are four, you are still angelic, inquisitive, whole. It is pre-everything. Before you’ve actually started to live, distilled into the essence of a living being. Pure light, you are, at four. Bursting with joy, with questions, with energy, with cuteness. All the attention feels so damn good. I love your daughter, strangers gloat. No one wishes you, the product of force, were aborted now.

II

The poverty of sleep catches you on a Tuesday, so utterly full and empty. She is talking to you and you see four, five eyes and you nod your little head and puff a word of yes, or no, suggest a smile escaping your lips. The beat of your blood is lulling and if you close your eyes it would feel final, too complete, and you are not ready. Not yet. The fireside tales are calling, you must listen, you must speak, even though your throat was slit and burned and poisoned. In the desert you scream, miles and miles and not a car in sight. These cacti, your witness, as you gasp like a fish, gulping hungrily for sweet air. The ballad of your adolescence is in you, streaming up and over and around your blood, thousands of days, curdling and swarming and one day it will swallow you whole, so completely and suddenly it is as if you dreamed it. But this time you are awake, you are rested, you simply are.

III

Honey spilled from her taut belly and we knew it then. Her fleeting gaze warmed us in the breath of that orchard. Our throats burned to speak, to tell her stories, to keep the joy from seeping out her veins. Her eyes like whiskey in the light, that perfect amber swimming and dancing and thirsty. The daughter of this light skips and hops and jumps. When her body tumbled onto the shore of the world over, we knew her glory.

Christina Berke is a teacher and a Libra. Previous work appears in Literary Orphans, Cleaver, and Ed Surge. She is currently working on an intergenerational memoir about her Chilean heritage, including the 1973 coup, through the lens of body image, interpersonal violence, and self worth. More at www.christinaberke.com.