Our Own Making

our own making
fiction, poetry, photography, and collage
by Ana Paula Pinto Diaz

for my family, the beginning of everything.
for Lily, through it all forever.
and for Paul, for showing me life and poetry are one and the same.

“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it”
— George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

Part 1
Origins

In our last days we lived as fugitives.
Last Days of a Volcano
When the neighbor’s parrot showed up dead on our doorstep my mother knew it was time to go,
although she had been expecting it for a long time. The first time, it was a cat, its head torn from
its body by our dogs and left to rot in the sun beside the front gate of our driveway. The second,
when all the caterpillars on the dill bush appeared dead one morning, shrinking and covered in
dew. The parrot was the third and the last.
My mother dreamed of this before it ever began and in the later days she often woke in fear.
Because of this, much of what we owned had been in boxes for years: in the corners of bedrooms,
the pantry, the garage, locked up so that we forgot half of it ever existed. I had asked her, many
times, why, and she always responded that we would go soon; that it would not be that much
longer. The days of riots and half-whispered tales of violence frightened me, although I did not, at
the time, find any meaning in it. At six years old I watched my mother learn to fire a double-barreled
shotgun and sleep with it under her bed each night.
It was like that: years of my childhood permeated by a sense that we were always ready to run.
—
In first grade my school was shut down by protests. With nothing else to do under lockdown, we
sat in rows outside our classrooms and discussed average things, like the funny way our teacher
said things in English. We waited, sipping water, taking turns to cry or go to the bathroom. I
heard they were using tear gas and imagined the world outside like one big, grey explosion. We
hardly understood what any of it meant.
My mother, upon hearing the news, had my grandmother drive her to the nearest barricaded
street and then walked through all of it—police beatings, clusters of people crying on the streets,
blood and water—the rest of the way, just far enough from the gas that it didn’t touch her. Although
she found me trembling, I had not been quite afraid because I knew she would come. It
made no sense, in my world as I knew it, that anything could keep her away. And even though my
father had died when I was only two, it never occured to me that she likewise inhabited any state
of mortality.
Once she found my brothers and I, the four of us took a cab down to where my grandmother
waited behind the barricade in her dark green van. At red lights, my grandmother crossed herself
and prayed, the same words passing her lips over and over in whispers. She was not Catholic or
particularly religious, but she prayed often. Like my mother she had known dreams and visions

almost all of her life; lived under the weight and luck of it. That day I know they would have taken
every child home if they could: the only ones who braved the riots to find us before the violence
subsided later that night.
It happened in my ninth year.
—
Preparing to leave the country, when we finally did, was like preparing for a funeral before the
person was dead. The bedrooms emptied out and dusted; the lawyers my mother met in secret;
the little crease between her eyebrows that seemed to become permanent; the endless whispering.
My mother’s brother, like a father to us, left the family hacienda for good. That land, where
we learned to love the earth so deeply and so well, had been in our family for centuries. For my
brothers and I, as for our mother and her brothers before us, it was akin to the beginning of life.
Within a few months it was sold, although the acres of oil palms knew no difference.
Even beyond the tangible, this time was marked by the sense that something, or someone, was to
be lost for good. It was hard to tell if we were leaving the country or if it was leaving us: there was
such a deep sense of abandonment, but I couldn’t tell if the core of it was in me or the dormant
volcano that held our whole lives in its lap. Cotopaxi: shining peak. Although, more often than
not, those days it appeared dull and somber behind rain clouds.
Years before, at the very edges of my memory, a smaller volcano on the outskirts of the capital
had blown, leaving a thin layer of ashes over everything for miles. The year we left, the volcano
was quiet but the people grew uneasy. The city rumbled not with the threat of ashes, but with restlessness
and hunger. Both times it was grey and full of smog. Tucked into a merciless landscape,
ravaged by poverty and corruption, we felt our home coming undone as a slowly rotting plum:
the surface still intact, the center growing softer and darker with each passing day.
I dreamt, seven times, that as we sat in our garden surrounded by fruit, the iron gates were
thrown open by a stampede of wild animals. I always forced myself awake before I could die,
trampled by an ox or mauled by a mountain lion.
—
My mother was a math teacher, but she had been born an artist. This became most apparent to
me in the weeks before leaving. In those days she made trips to artisan stands and antique shops,
collecting art like she could gather up the soul of the country in bits of gold leaf and cast iron.
The home of her entire life she would carry with her in tiny mirrors and statuettes: gilded frames,
ceramics, the body of the Virgen rendered six inches tall. For us, she said, these would be reminders—an
origin story wrapped neatly in day-old newspapers, packed tightly in boxes.

Years later, a living room erected like a colonial church altar, thousands of miles from our beginnings.
We returned to one particular shop often then, days which had a feeling of age and antiquity I
could never explain. The wood and dust breathed into me a sense that time, between those walls,
was fragmented. Imaginary. I had lived a hundred different lives and they were all happening at
once.
The box, I found on the shelf of a mahogany ceramics cabinet in a corner in the back. It was simple—a
delicate brocade of blues and greens on a grey background, it’s lid fastened down with a
little plastic button that looked almost like a fang. Inside it was covered with a silky, pearl colored
lining. Holding it was like trying to remember a dream that has just slipped from your memory. I
felt as if I had known it all my life, and yet, I wasn’t sure where that life had gone. For days I held
it to my chest like a toddler with a new plush toy, looking for something—just the right thing—
to steal away inside it. My little runaway box.
—
The small beetle was making its way along the sill of my bedroom window when I found it, its
back the pearly black that shimmers green and indigo in turns of light. My little brother, standing
beside me, reached over and nudged it with his finger to see if it was alive, and the small body
scuttled a few steps forward. I picked up a leaf and coerced the insect onto it so I could bring it
closer and stare. I then held up the little box and gently laid both the insect and leaf inside. We
named the beetle Whiskey, because we had met a dog named that once, and because the world in
English tumbled in our mouths like something sweet and a little bit foreign.
We leave in early spring.
—
By four in the morning we are awake, getting dressed quickly, tossing bags and blankets into the
trunk. In the cool morning our breaths are fog, each of us floating in a little cloud of our own
groggy exhalations. The whole garden is a cool blue at this time, draped over with a gentle notyet
light, so that the green of the trees and grasses floats tantalizingly beneath the blue haze. The
smell of rotting fruit is softer than in the afternoons, when it is buoyed by heat.
I hold the little box with my small friend in it tightly to my chest. My uncle comes around the
back of the car and hands me a rolled up quilt. Seeing what is in my hands, he reminds me to
leave the lid cracked open for air. He tells me I can sleep in the car, plants a small kiss on the top
of my head, and makes his way over to the driver’s seat. In his gait nothing gives way, in his steps
not a single sign that he is giving up an entire life. The rest of us follow and we begin to

move. On the road I check the box periodically, and when we stop to stretch for the first time I
pick some grasses for Whiskey to eat. When I peek inside it scuttles from one end of the box to
the other, and I smile.
__
For the next two and a half hours I drift in and out of sleep. My head rolls on my mother’s lap, my
whole body swaddled in quilts. Between dreams I watch the different tones of the sky rolling by
the window above my head. Sometimes tree branches brushing the glass; sometimes the nearness
of the side of the mountain, dripping with rainwater and small white blossoms on vines; or on the
other side, the expanse beyond the drop of the cliff, the undulating greenery looking soft enough
to swim in. As we enter the agricultural region the air turns a little acrid: the smell of machinery
processing palm seeds for oil. Everything is beautiful still, dense and rich and earthy.
The next time I open the box the beetle is dead.
—
There is a small chapel by the side of the road, on the cliffside, close enough to look as if it might
slide over the edge at any moment. We stop here, as we had done so many times before on trips to
and from the hacienda—only this time we will go much further, and there is no way back. The
chapel itself is white with a red-tiled roof, and its door anciently heavy, built of dark wood and
inlaid with bits of iron, all of it damp with the rains of the last few hours.
Inside all is candlelight. I hold my little box in one hand and my mother’s hand in the other. As
I did in the antique shop, I sense the warping of time—gentle, but heavy. We take in each other’s
warmth in the small space, cross ourselves, and light candles. We pray that we will make it the
rest of the way without trouble: we know these lands of mudslides and wilderness are merciless.
Before we turn to go, I leave the little box with the beetle inside it beside the altar.
I wanted the soul of this valley to belong to me in a way that it never did.

Part 2
All We Made

Market
The scent of it familiar for blocks; fresh and rotting fruit,
twenty kinds of potatoes still carrying the earth on them.
This is the center of life: hundreds of bodies sweating and hungry,
and the dogs waiting for scraps. One hand for change and another
for this woven plastic bag, bulging as we do, bellies rounded
for a moment rich with newborn fruit. A certain red—a beet,
this textile, hands raw with labor—my feeding is the work of centuries.
In that corner: vegetable foliage, birds of paradise, little Amazon bared
for our taking. Still damp with its rains, still home to the grasshopper,
the mantis that came so far upriver in its folds. The smallest of bodies
that knew this land before it ever thought of us; before this basin
knew a mouth to sip from it; before the cacao seed was plucked;
before, even, it had a name—and so long before it began to burn.
Beneath these tents where we have sheltered from rain
with the dogs and the flies: if only we had stayed like this, weaving
between stacks of rice, gathering shellfish, spitting out seeds.

After the Explosion
In those days it often looked as if it had been snowing—
the burnt-tip orchid, chalk plateau
and everything else that found us
after the explosion.
Everything the gentle pallor of ash; every body a white weeping cherry tree
laden with blooms.
In those days we knew the plain in its entirety; and even after,
we stayed
if only for a little while longer.
remember: a child’s small hands on the veranda; the fine, warm powder
the color of dust. below me, in the backyard twilight the garden
tent torn open with heat.
It might have looked like war: a man or a volcano, a series of bombs
or a single burst. The same heat, the toppling, the far-off sirens wailing; held breath waiting
for the aftershock.
Had it been different
in time we might have understood
erosion, or how our bodies could rise out of the sea; could have been
the myth of reinvention, the burning
top of a volcano giving birth to another; or rather the possibility
that everything was temporary.
Instead these days we have grown used to stillness
elsewhere; the softer, colder snows. A woman like we once might have seen
on television could ask us what we have left behind.
We would tell her eagerly
as if we might return
we would begin in the spring, the blooms not yet
fallen; the landscape still intact.
to draw a map:

Convocación y Renacimiento
Statue of the Virgen del Panecillo, Quito, Ecuador
She who strangles the snake
reminds you of how it began: the volcano
gives way to a valley
gives way to a hill—and on it her body like a beacon.
Virgen; madonna; woman of the apocalypse
what we have taken
to mean salvation, and the whole world and our city
tucked neatly below.
In my dreams I am there: a graffitied highway, a gas mask for ashes, residue
of an ancient birth story I am hardly familiar with. For years I saw the snow:
I did not know it would be years before I understood.
Not God, but mountain. This earth cathedral; the wooded nave, the buttressless vault.
Cradle of everything we know, and have known, and will ever—
only until it swallows us whole.
The true colonial church is the facade; is my body
not that body trampled in the streets. But one seated, praying, deep
in its belly, a navel coated in gold.
Inside the woman chains the snake
and this time it surrenders. Outside a woman in wool
shakes a paper cup with two small coins in it. Wingless,
a lifted palm, empty.
It is like this for centuries: each time her march is holy, unguilded. And each time
after days of clashes a palm is offered empty,
shaking—but my pockets bear no fruit.
In the shadow of the valley all of us only
another in a series of centuries. Above us, on the hill, the dancer:
lifted palm, wings of aluminum;
a body verging on movement for decades—
the only one in the world with wings like an angel.
And so on, and so on—this story is ritual.

Six Words For Departure
He uses this word:
grit
body
distance
often.
He is washed in green light.
The taxi is for making advances—the curb
for the inevitable split. If one hand opens
like tulips, the body
a garden.
He swims in it.
/
Earlier, on a rooftop, you begin to understand
you are nothing but the destined
encounter. He speaks your language—
as if to fit into
the space it has cut out
for both of you, or
out of both of you
belonging nothing but a shared sense
of alienation; he croons

as if deshacer means an undoing
of harm and not clothing.
If not for his air of insistence
you might have overlooked the sound of it.
/
If this spiral,
like the evening,
had come to a different conclusion
the light might have been unbearable. Or rather,
the body laid bare
might have simply
dissolved.
In a split second the hand on the thigh
pulled back by vertigo. In a split second
the car door closes. You are alone; the driveway
is washed in green light.
He speaks of:
tongues
pressure
collapse—
often, not at all.

My Teacher Makes / Reinvents the Universe
You left as if you foresaw it: this end, the heaviness you could have no longer borne
after all these years in the city. We were once all of us strangers
to it. Like you, over time, we found our own ways and words
for the losses, and if I could draw a trajectory to my own reinvention
it might have all begun in this room: your pen
clicking on the table as if with it you might have found
a better explanation for what you would not name.
You sought in it only what came after; I wanted only a word for the bruising
beneath your eyes, if only a phrase for the ache, as if we might have explained it into
vanishing. If I had known what it meant—to be seated where light filtered in
so purely; to be at a loss for words when yours were so abundant—I might have known
it was only a matter of patience. You spoke with stillness only to stir up everything
relentlessly. Then by summer you were gone.
Even now I hear your voice; read poetry in it; picture the room and everything
in the soft window light; all of us as if made of glass.
You, who knew what it meant each time we laid ourselves open
for scrutiny; the silence after; the met gaze across the wide, white table. Hours of our own
making and unmaking. To know if I am but a speck at least then
it was within this galaxy of our own. Everything we did
to feel significant, later let ourselves dissolve—
or rather, to find that we had wanted both things.
I will imagine you like this: some evening
in the fall: low light oozing over glass: a poem mouthed softly
in the driver’s seat of your car, and you: nodding your head, as if to music.

Even Then, a Downpour
In the beginning we pulled leaves from eucalyptus trees.
I knew my way back by the sound of your voice
beneath the rose bushes
beneath the rain warmed by tea-water, our bodies
bruised on low hanging branches
the avocados bruised on the warm, wet ground.
Even now the rain reminds us of a beginning;
I begin to find my way back by other sounds.
In years since we found a yearning elsewhere
—for other gardens and how we learned to love
a dryer landscape. In the grassland, each spring
the chicks in an old bronze bathtub, each summer
the inescapable gaggle. The first time: hairlike, dandelion
feathers between my fingers; weightless.
It was a movement north, the sound of your voice sheltered
in these plains and everything that changed at the center
of our childhood—the evenings spent on fenced-in lawns
or wading in the reservoir; making something
softer of these years
before you left—another immeasurable distance
from where it all began.
A constant reminder returns each spring: a downpour
or leaves of eucalyptus returning like the myth
of a life back then.
As the frost prepares to settle I know
a name for it: I know a word for grief.
I do not know a word for how bodies separate.
It was a hard year for the way we thought about love;
but you said you dreamed about me, even then.

Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair
Twombly makes your body
a stranger: you become her: the rose that unravels
the wound of loneliness that remains unspeakable
and what I imagine heartache must look like
on a tightly-pulled canvas.
a number of strangers
enter under a condition of stillness. of silence.
no one speaks but wanders, looking. you and I
for the love of it: we walk like mystics
in a trance, spin like dervishes in silence—
every sound will stop if you let it.
really I admit
my knowledge of your body is only this:
the sense of a figure in a midtown gallery,
skylight fragments pooling softly on the side
of your face. and each time it is like this:
the rose bleeds out
light, as we conjure it, begins to settle—
every aspect of this body gives in to it.

I Call it Waking
I call it waking as if it is new. Each time morning
light is in pieces: each time an open window like
spring again: this time like nothing might change.
I am slow before noon. I know the hum of these
cicadas as if
nothing ever was before.
I am swallowed; I become
comfortable. I love the wind-hum sound of
the almost-but-not tropical storm / how you call it
a home as if
something about it might last.
This house, this window facing the highway
facing the cul-de-sac, and all of it sung
(the white-winged dove
the northern mockingbird
the fragile carolina wren)
into being. I miss this preemptively.
Under the pressure of rain I and everything will soften
as if to break would be the easier thing
(and only then, fold over the window’s edge
and only then, dream).
I’m but an outline on the other side of the glass, and after
four years of waking to the sounds of living
trees, their bodies heavy
with the birds and cicadas, I am heavy and I
do not know how to leave.

Santo Domingo de los Colorados / Tsáchila
It begins with a history that evades us—this movement
this indescribable tenderness for the hold of the valley
that raised us. Each winding on the cliffside road we knew
so well, each landmark of the equatorial backbone was another
in a series of visions that made and unmade us.
In dreams I am the washed out roads, the blue-throated
hummingbird against the raven, the Devil’s features carved into
the rock face familiar like my own unmooring. It opens
with fog, a chapel at the mouth of a cliff, and in it the rows of candles,
and Mary in her body of wood, weeping because the earth has a tendency
to split. Only each time afterwards, after the rain, in the chasms
the soft earth breaks with new green. Like this all the land undulates;
our heads bumping gently on pillows in the backseats of cars. We sleep and wake,
forgetting which is real. We name rivers like shamans in a language
that isn’t ours but familiar.
My hair, your hair, we are of the same
body. And we have the same dream, where small, white flowers
line the walls and precipices: always, the sharp scent of burning
palm oil and the factory hum that squeezes it from its bearing fruit;
the snakes I see awake and in my dreams, shedding, cut open for ransom.
This: my holy land: when I wake all of it is on fire—
save the blue, chlorinated pool besides the muddy river
and the sound of frogs, endlessly, in all our waking.

the end.

Special thanks to Ian Schimmel, the 2019-2020 Creative Writing Thesis Cohort,
and the Rice University English and Visual and Dramatic Arts Departments.