Ana Hernández: LADI BEÑE

The cloud cries too, sometimes out of happiness, when the fish clumps people together, for example. And so it flows, almost fire, in its effective liquidness, and where fresh water meets brine, and in the estuary, and in the sink, she jumps splashing it all with mud.

The beautiful beast, with her muddy and evasive choreography, concurs on the net for communal peace, the complex peace of the rain and the cornfield, of the shrimp and the chili, of the gourd and the horse shit. That of atole and totopo.

Rivers and lakes drink from her flaming sweat to moisten their ancestral thirst, before they dry up and only the soil is left, dusty and fugitive, melancholic from the sip that gives it life, that makes it fertile, at 38 degrees, on the isthmus.

They are called (without mentioning seas and oceans) Victoria, Onondaga, Huron, Karachai, Balaton, Orre, Okeechobee, Biwa, Baikal, Songla, Bhopal, Chad, Taihu, Chapala, Léman, Michigan or Congo, Loire, Rhine, Amazonas, Citarum, Yangtsé, Mississippi or Bravo.

Yes, the one that another exemplary rebel crossed on foot, like several generations of nonconformists, “to end up covered in mud in a mall parking lot in Texas.”

The wet back, the legs, the arms, the womb, the bowels and the soaked eyelids, all at once, looking straight at the one who does not tolerate, and the one who loves, accompanies, and tarnishes.

A house, a plate, an oven, water, earth, air, and fire again, in unrepeatable deltas that would lead to dust again, to rot happily and regenerate the cycle that feeds and nourishes. In the mud.

In the concurrence of the word with the matter, everything can mean something else caressing the tonality: “fish, shrimp, her sister, snake; coconut leaf, scream, howl, destroy, shred, saw.”

And if we could see her smile, in her marine, terrestrial and tehuana resistance, we will most likely perceive that one of the teeth of her flaming weapon is made of gold. Of 24.