Violeta Orozco

LA APARECIDA

The neighbor told us
she came to say goodbye
twenty-five years later
she knocked on the same door
imagining someone
should be living there still.

But no one answered
not even a dog
rushed out to meet her like before

she could have come
six months ago when he was still alive
and barking at every neighbor on the block.
 What was she thinking?
Coming back like that into our lives
when we’d already left
for other cities

my brother perched high
upon a steeple in Oaxaca
restoring a 300 year old dome
his magic hands returning
baroque churches to their original aspect
while I gasped in awe at el milagro, the miracle:
¡mi tía estaba viva! 

She was last seen on November first
día de los muertos niños
claiming she had come back,
La desaparecida finalmente aparecida. 

The strangest thing is my dad didn’t see her.
He left the house to get milk and eggs,
milk and eggs for Christs’ sake
at the exact moment she walked
into her old haunts. 

She never came back
never left
a phone number
an address
any sign or sound. 

She left as she had come,
no warning or farewell. 

I wonder what she had come to tell us
even as I write
from another country,
my ear pressed to the ground
to catch the slightest beat
of her footsteps
upon my father’s lawn.

Violeta Orozco is the author of Stillness in the Land of Speed (Jacar Press, forthcoming), The Broken Woman Diaries (Andante Books) and El cuarto de la luna (Proyecto Literal). She is a diasporic bilingual poet, spoken word performance artist and translator writing in English and Spanglish who celebrates the borders that have shaped her work as a transnational writer. Born and raised in Mexico City's sacred mountains and industrial peripheries -as well as the Bahía de Banderas coast in Nayarit- her poems seek to honor her ancestral roots. She celebrates the Chicana, Latina and Caribbean maestras in the East and West coast who have shaped her work by translating their poems into Spanish in her monthly column in Nueva York Poetry Review. She currently studies her Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Romance Literatures at University of Cincinnati and holds an M.A. from Rutgers University.