Mariana Goycoechea

BIO

Mariana Goycoechea is a Guatemalan/Argentinian writer from Queens, New York. A proud child of CUNY, Mariana is a full-time foreign language tutor at her alma mater, Hunter College, while writing her dissertation in French colonial history at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her work has been published in NYSAI Press and The Rumpus. She has participated in Las Dos Brujas Workshop (memoir), a Winter Tangerine Review poetry workshop at Poet's House, and a Tin House Craft Intensive with Naomi Jackson. She is currently working on her first chapbook, Trajectory of Muertos. Mariana alludes to themes in her poems and essays she finds increasingly important like generational trauma, mental illness, survival, and their intersection with oppressed identities.

Tierra//Fuego//Mar//

Me: Como se dice earth?//

You: Tierra.

Me:  I ask you as I try to track down your footsteps across Guatemalan desert//land of Eternal
Spring//Mexican costa//American dirt// and prison cement//My feet trace yours perfectly
contouring from tip to heel. Tierra you touched and scorched with

You: Mi fuego.

Me: And wasn’t it the size of your ruling planet, Jova? Tell me how your brought Jupiter and its
moons to tierra//how you made even rain sob on the wettest days?//

You:  Tierra y fuego.

Me: You were born on a rainy Monday//a ball of fuego//sprinting towards galaxies//a million big
bangs// You
                  Are
                           Infinity//

Like

You: Mar.

Me: Tierra claimed you back and you: rebelde//renegade//rebel// said nobody burns fuego//I’m
not a thing to possess but possesses//watch me burn this stardust of a corpse down to liquid
gold//amber lava//watch me return to tierra’s glistening womb//

Me: Mar?

You: So come then. Find me at the threshold of the living and dead//vivientes and muertos//a
portal the sun has turned into diamonds. Find me here. Follow the prints my fiery feet have left
in the sand to the…

Me: Mar.

You: Eso mismo. Follow the first three letters of the name I gave you. Follow that sign of the
cross. Follow the trajectory of this muerto
.

Me: Tierra//Fuego//Mar.

© The Acentos Review 2018