My mother is a quetzal bird.

Yes, I mean resplendent. Yes, I mean she contains earth and sky.

But also my mother            is a quetzal bird:

she’s adorned the heads of serpents. Men I barely knew,
men she barely knew, who thought themselves gods

startled when she turned to a canyon at dawn
or slipped from their fists into a strange song heard through beryl fog.

Yes, I mean she carries the weight of an origin story on her back.

My mother (quetzal bird)

has skin and bones the color of pulque, but she birthed
this tiny canela-colored thing who wailed at her breast dipped in blood

red plumage. She’d say I am no one’s mother. I gave birth to the wind.
So I learned the divinity of vacancy, and how you cannot hold rare creatures.

My mother is a quetz-
                           al bird.

Hollow-flowered, with fertile beak where becalming tongue should be.

My mother
Yes, I mean
the shape breath also takes. Yes,
the quetzal bird.