‘Ritual Glitch’

 

I.

 

A child uncovers an effigy of the rain god. They drive their shovel down into its head.

  Hairline cracks

pour down Cocijo’s face, trembling tears, as screams from the kitchen signal fire.

  Tonight dinner is smoke.

 

II.

 

Tonight dinner is smoke. Inside Mexico City’s heart a couple dine in a restaurant serving

  smoke in all of its states.

A single corn cob arrives on a silver platter. The waiter dresses it in liquid guajillo smoke.

  Everyone applauds

the bizarre ritual of harnessing the elements.

 

III.

 

Everyone applauds the bizarre ritual of harnessing the elements. Lightning streaks across

  Nueve Puntas,

while curanderas ask which deity they pissed off today. It’s the festival of someone nameless,

  a saint lost joyously to history.

An archaeologist was invited but later expelled by residents wielding machetes when they

  dared insist

the ruins were nothing more than mere stones.

 

IV.

 

Nothing more than mere stones, recounts the anthropologist as the ruins turn the other way,

  possessing a man

through fervent dreams, demanding his dues be paid. The anthropologist has arrived to

  observe how a family’s fridge

is festooned with clippings from an old monograph, a calendar citing a different, long-dead

  anthropologist

because we do not remember our own traditions. On top of the fridge sits an urn of another

  forgotten god.

 

V.

 

On top of the fridge sits an urn of another forgotten god. It is 1977 & everybody is looting

  somebody.

Outside the window, in equatorial light, a woman hawks papaya while a man sells caritas

  to a Midwestern businessman

who could not explain history if you held a machete to his head. He owns the ex-hacienda,

  once a dry goods store.

Thick granite columns blister in tropical sun & a dog dies as the Midwestern businessman

  buys everything for nothing.

The clock strikes three.

 

VI.

 

The clock strikes three. Everyone is eating lunch, but the businessman’s wife is eating

  his best friend.

Everyone knows but the businessman. The caritas broaden their smiles from behind glass.

  During a séance,

the lightning god, Cocijo, comments on the house of glass. There’s a rumble from the ruins

  by the river,

& the moon admires its reflection.

 

VII.

 

There’s a rumble from the ruins by the river, & the moon admires its reflection. It is drunk

  on mezcal

& the god of the underworld, Pitao Bezelao, is grievous. To think after five hundred years

  the moon

is still drinking & humans are still thieves! He orchestrates with the elements a sudden death.

  The clock strikes three.

 

Morgan L. Ventura is a Belfast-based poet and writer. Poems appear in Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, and Southword, among others, while essays can be found in Al Jazeera, Geist, and Best Canadian Essays 2021. Shortlisted for the 2023 Listowel Writers’ Week Poetry Collection Award, Ventura holds an MA in Poetry from the Seamus Heaney Centre and PhD from the University of Chicago.

 

 

Morgan L. Ventura is our Poet of the Month for May. Read two other poems by Morgan here and here.

Main image by Morgan L. Ventura