Marcy Rae Henry
Marcy Rae Henry is a Latina born and raised in Mexican-America/The Borderlands. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Columbia Review, Epiphany, Hobart, Cathexis Northwest, Black Coffee Review and Writers Resist, among others. Her work has received a Chicago Community Arts Assistance Grant and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship and has been shortlisted for the Fish Short Memoir Prize and longlisted for the Disquiet Literary Prize. One of her stories received Honorable Mention in the New Millennium Writing Awards and another was a semi-finalist in the American Short(er) Fiction Contest. DoubleCross Press will publish a chapbook of poems.
You can’t really drink out of a cactus
Even though Hollywood says nothing holds fresh water
like the plant that protects itself
Mis tíos drank beer out of cans
and asked us to bring them one after another
We were like the ‘h’ en español
Silent
A placeholder
La audiencia
Some of us swore we’d never grow up and marry tipos así
Some of us swore no casarnos
to be rara like the ~ or el ʹ in text messages
Would Hollywood have us laughing as we flashed forward
to my prima’s husband snapping móle-covered fingers at her
demanding: traeme otra tortilla
Would it show her telling him: get on up—y traeme una chela
with música swelling in the background
Maybe it would show my familia looking at her
as if she slapped him
as if she tried to drink water out of a cactus
Los del desierto know that unless it’s a special barrel cactus
the green goo inside sickens you
maybe even dehydrates you to death
Even Hollywood knows that insulting your marido
might get you una cachetada
Y no hay laugh-track at the border
You’re not always sola
But you’re on one side or the other
Un ʹ isn’t todo lo opuesto
of an ‘h’ en español
which bolsters the letter next to it
Ser soltera isn’t the opposite of being married
Who thought to bring the cactus inside to be a houseplant