My amiga came over after church
on my last Sunday in Tejas.

She helped roll my period-only underwear into flautas, helped zip closed

my last suitcase, then stretched on bed with me for hours, stroking my cactus of a patilla,
                                   a skinscape most visited by steel flea market tweezers.

I love the rosepetal-soft hair here.
​

No novela confession
from a boy saying he loves me without having compared our pubes.
 
No serenata performance
with a song romanticizing mis ojos, labios, pecho—anything but my vello.

Just an opinion and a fingertip’s caress                                                          
that overwrote fifth-grade whispers
of baby knuckle hairs, eighth-grade pointing
at then-untended unibrow, Mami’s demands that I shave
for faldas cortas.

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Magaly Garcia is from south-south Texas and she received an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She finds muses in espantos and snow, and when she isn’t cussing, she is writing in the dark of her house. When she isn’t writing in the dark of her house, she is summoning fantasmas to haunt her cat and cactus.

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