Every day she opens the windows. The tight
uniform forms folds in the sweaty body.
Calcified stuck to the greasy, dirty skin
persistent stained by the pestilent air.
She feels the plastic texture of the curtain in her palms,
as the bright light unearth wrinkles in her eyes,
gasping the dust-filled breath. Bounding and imprisoning,
tightness encapsulated in the form of repetitive routine.
Glimpsing the mangled spinal cord of ancestry,
she feels their ancient eyes on her sticky flesh,
spirits that carve sanctuaries out of her mundane minuscule home.
Precipitating thoughts, heavy as graveyard stone.
Her body is the cheapest property to purchase in this country,
yet, her backbreaking labor is not enough to own it.
Dios Mio, I can’t take another day.
Thunderous emptiness corrodes and intensifies
the existence of someone who must remain unnamed.
Someone who rolls their tongue,
touching the strong r's up until the constellations of mouth sky.
Someone that is embedded in a story
of imposed silences, of tortured voices, and interrupted speeches.
Every day she sends to the mail crumpled envelopes.
A lifetime pocket in sandy papers. She never harvested in her life,
but her hands are still marked with coagulated blistering blood.
That smudges her cursive trembled letter
Red arterial ink dripping courage.
An envelope of faith and remnants of excruciating days.
Extrañar — infinitudes of hope that bridge languages.
A prospect of future to a daydreamed past home.
A phantom unreachable memory, desert grains ghosting her fingertips.
At scalding night, with tiredness intricate to her bones,
her dried lips mumble prayers, echoes in the soundless room.
Feelings wryly clubbed into inconspicuous mausoleums.
“Dios mio, haz que las letras lleguen a su destino”.
Luiza Louback is a Latin-American, Brazilian emerging writer, and high schooler. Her work has appeared in national anthologies, in Parallax Review and Rising Phoenix Review. When she is not writing, she teaches English to low-income students and advocates for literary accessibility in Latin America.