Cuando tú y yo tomamos un vaso de agua

When you and I drink a glass of water that truth is water between our hands you know how to touch. - Susana Villalba (Marea) In the kitchen fire pit I see my friend drinking from the glass she has told secrets to the crystalline ear enzymes from her saliva mix with the water the calcium of her teeth bite the rim like a fish crashing into the icy surface of a lake. When I was a child I was forced to drink the water from the fish tank at my grandmother's house. there lived the sick goldfish their eyes staring into nothingness, their fins frayed the fake reef photos upholstered with green slime that has grown under the fluorescent light they think it is the sun How much water there was in those years, on the walls the paint swollen with humidity swollen with humidity blisters that we break with our fingers exhale a sound that is mute and fills the room with a watery murmur with a watery murmur Thirst drags whole populations into your throat Tiny spheres, fossils, treasures of the sea, metals the Paleozoic mud - you read all about it a textbook with drawings of mammoths the great meltdown that you now drink The pilus live for a diaphanous instant in the water of your cup they have no eyes, they imagine the world in temperatures they have developed a strange fetish for collecting hairs and attaching them to their body one of them found a platinum blonde strand with a stye that wiggles while Eats the slat of the walls while eating the weather Mariel Vela Agradecimiento a David Ayala-alfonso, Nicole Rozas, Cristina Umaña, Samuel Nicole, Juan Carlos León, Martín Barrientos, Alma Saladin, Marco Rountree, Adrien Pescayre, Emilia Naidich, Mary Carmen Chapital, Juan Luis Gomez, Eduardo Berumen, Mariel Vela