The mangled arm emerged from her womb like a chicken’s foot. She turned it into barbs of milk
& pure agave sugar.

What else could she do, but cover the stillborn in shredded coconut and one glob of raspberry
jam for her lengua? Baby lungs make pink

teardrops on tongues. Hard to crush inside the mouth. Then came her brother’s death.
She molded his strong shoulders into conchas,

baked them into soft blue pies. For the man who killed him, she sifted fifty
rounds of yellow powder that kept coming down.

Then came my father’s death. She turned his spine into a caramel twist and fed it
to the oven. She learned to love the taste of wet needles in cake, and anise, the black rain

that shakes through time. My grandmother slit my father’s bones and let them fly with yeast.
Glazed joints and dead man’s knees and a calavera

head with prickly-pear eyeballs in the windows. Soul breads are white & red, like a calvo
shot with a bullet.

I visit her empty sugarhouse in Texas, crunch the ribcages and coffins of spun pink & gold
in my jaw. Graveyards

of iced wedding balls and apricot, rosa, & dead cat’s tongues. Now that she’s in heaven,
I fold her milky wedding lace and her sweet skeleton baby into bread of kings.

My eyes blacken with ghosts of Mexican candy. My cavities crackle with grit.