1
Slicked
with a birther’s goo, it
gleams up green from the ground—
Little blade.
How much toil, to split the sealed doors
of the mother—
And scrape up
through rock and clay, the hard sharp March
of the ground—
our little god, our flayed lord.
—
Xipe Totec (shee-pay toh-tek) appears in Aztec art as a human figure wearing a tunic of human skin.
The hand-skins flop prominently below his elbows, and his human face, usually grinning, peers out through the eye slits and mouth hole of a skinned-face mask.
He was a god of transitions, oppositions.
After which the rotting skin was removed, and a “new” human
being appeared.
—
—in the shimmer,
their hummingbird cloaks, their
plumed heads
as they ran toward slaughter—flowers
in riot on a field—
They flayed the slain captives’ skins and wore them, dyed
“golden clothes”—to impersonate Spring’s
Skinless Lord—
conjure a power I wanted. You know,
to make the corn stand up. Piercing the hard-pan
inside my head, new self
—
green and scored—
Died. My sister died. In the fourth year
of parentless night.
Aztec blood-drinking, why should I oppose it? Or put down
my proper
—
terror of the earth—