Itzel Basualdo

Q.E.P.D..

when the half mexican in me dies, and you’re killing it right now,
the first thing to change is that
juan gabriel and marco antonio solis will no longer make me cry  i’ll stop
throwing sazon in your eyes   i’ll soon leave my dark hair, my hair dark  let it clog the shower drain
i won’t tell you i’m sorry  i’ll never scrub pee off a toilet bowl that is not mine, again  that was my mother’s
job  not with my knees pressed to the muck on the tile  te digo yo  not mine
  and i’ll never wash your dishes 
soon enough i’ll forget to call her, my mother   she’ll call every day once she worries i’m dead, but i won’t
respond because i’ll forget my name is itzel   it’ll now be something easy, sweet, simple, like susan or ashley 
but for now, i am still itzel, and i am forgetting the hail mary and our father   forgetting to mistrust a drunk,
older man  my r’s stopped rolling   they sit there, going dry, like they’ve forgotten how to dance   i think by
now you no longer want to watch.

and when you’ve really killed me, i’ll forget how much i loved watching my grandmother make tortillas. how i
waited to eat the first one, right off el comal.

BIO

Itzel Basualdo is an interdisciplinary artist from Miami, Florida. She hated the place for many years, but now misses it terribly because she lives in Chicago. Her practice often involves photography, video, installation, text, sometimes all at the same time. Her work has appeared in The MFA Years, Sinking City Lit Mag, Creative Nonfiction, Saw Palm Magazine, and the documents folder on her laptop. Born to a Mexican mother and Argentinean father, Itzel is currently writing about what her heritage holds in a chapbook titled "La concha de tu madre." She is a MFA Candidate in Writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

www.itzelbasualdo.com


instagram: @lalicenciadaitzelbasualdo



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