Michelle Salcido

Instead

The moon swallows herself whole instead of washing anyone’s
dirty socks.

Stop calling me sweetheart. Let’s run all the red lights instead.

I peel an orange and you eat from my hand, lick light from my
fingers instead of regret.

Instead of a hat, I wear twin humming birds hatching in a nest of
thorns.

Instead of the same old fairy tale, I will tell you the story of my
grandfather’s back:

He had a hump like a camel. Inside the hump, his spine
was a train wreck. The cars all jumped the track, twisted
and bunched together. When he was a little boy, he fell
from a high place, maybe a tower or a beanstalk. It was
beyond the doctors, beyond the curanderas; they said he
would die before he became a man, that he would husband
no wife, father no children. His mother thought, that only
leaves God to get us out of this one. His fifteenth birthday came
and went and the train wreck decided that it was still a
train, no matter what it looked like. It kept whistling
through the desert nights. And that is how my grandfather
became a preacher. His back was a gospel. He had only to
stand in front of his congregation and his body would
minister of brokenness and strength. His hump would
say, Our God is a Healing God. Our God has his own plans.