Santería (Fuck Sublime)

I woke up on the floor of the curandera's tent, bathed in red fire ants and the smell of sulfurous eggs. The thick air copal incense wafting through every orifice in my body. As she presses the obsidian plate of a conch shell to my stomach, she makes a diamond shaped slit, my entrails and womb peeking through the slit in my flesh. As she rubs the shell of an egg through the tissues and fissures, she has a vision of the birth of my daughters: blood and velvet of their mother washed away in the river; sprites of the river. Purified snake venom pours its way into my bloodstream, my soul launches from my body into the curandera’s comb box. The lingering shell of disconnected of flesh and cartilage becomes a residence of recollection; a migrant of Xibalba. My bisabuela’s birth in the barn she would later be late miscarry in, inky blood and toxin permeating out from between her legs; my priestess foremothers sending off all the spirits of the unborn babies in and out of utero. The egg cracks, the yolk purple, molding into the shape of a fetus. My spirit snaps back into my body like a rubber band, the curandera’s liver- spotted hands grounding me by my temples in place as her chants reach my ears and her sweat beads fall into my eyes; the lock her comb box unhinged and cavernous. As she rubs the last of the aloe vera paste and Vaporub into my wound, the gaping hole and tissue regenerate and scar themselves into the shape of a crescent moon. A sound between a laugh and a sob discordantly emits from me as something flaps inside my stomach and crawls up my esophagus; through my mouth, a moth glides out, perching itself on the tip of my nose, as I wept with each fluttering kiss of its pulsing geometric- stamped wings.