Before Ama’s town of Salitrillos, MX was a town it was an endless pueblo of fields.
For two decades Tatarabuelo’s hands brought life to the milpas.
A field is a field until it becomes a curse. Tatarabuelo says: Todo empezo con un relámpago.
Fields of scarlet, swallowing every green.
The smoke thick as a tongue. Tatarabuelo & the others carried buckets of water
on their backs from el tanqúe. For three decades
Tatarabuelo woke up drenched in sweat, cussed at his own body
for not being able to become water.
When our house caught fire, in San Antonio, TX, I watched vines of fire grow.
The fuego an octopus wrapping each arm tight across the sinking house.
A house is a house until it is reduced to a dream again.
For years I’ve wondered how a curse can cross borders—
How the fire Tatarabuelo couldn’t extinguish found us.
I’ve been careful about starting fires I can’t control.
I walk next to a man tonight. In his house our fingernails peel off
like rose petals when we touch each other.
When we lay in his bed he says: You could burn a whole city down.
I’ve never seen a city on fire, only a body of a man on the verge of
erupting for not knowing why a fire follows him.
Every time I see a flame I want to ask Tatarabuelo,
How do you put a burning city back to sleep?
In the middle of the night, every single pore on my body drips,
when I close my eyes I see Tatarabuelo standing in the middle of charred fields.
Before he can say anything his body bursts into flares of vermillion.
SAÚL HERNÁNDEZ is a queer writer from San Antonio, TX who was raised by former undocumented parents. Saúl has an MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Texas at El Paso. His debut poetry collection, How to Kill a Goat & Other Monsters, is out now, University of Wisconsin Press. Saúl is the recipient of a 2025 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He's the winner of both the 2022 Pleiades Prufer Poetry Prize judged by Joy Priest & the 2021 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize judged by Victoria Chang. He is a finalist for the 2024 Dartmouth Poet in Residence at The Frost Place. Saúl's poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize & Best of The Net. Saúl’s work is forthcoming/featured in the American Poetry Review, Sundog Lit, Poetry Daily, The Slowdown, Literary Hub, Columbia Journal, Pleiades, Split This Rock, Frontier Poetry, Poet Lore, Foglifter Journal, & elsewhere. He's a Macondista, a 2021 Tin House Alum, & a 2024 Lambda Literary Fellow.
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