The Twenty-Thousand Pound Woman (An Ekphrasis for Coyolxauqui)
by Tomás Baiza
What if I told you, with a straight face,
That in 1978, workers renovating the
Basement of a Mexico City
Bookstore uncovered the
Body of a dismembered woman?
What if, as they brushed the
Dirt from her inscrutable face, the
Horror and importance of the
Scene became manifest:
That here lay
Coyolxauhqui,
She Who Is Adorned With Bells,
Queen of the Milky Way?
Everyone knows that chilangas—the
Women of Tenochtitlan—were not
And are not
To be fucked with.
Indeed, you,
Coyolxauhqui
Measured eleven feet in diameter and
Weighed in at a cool
Ten tons of pink basalt.
By the time the breathless
Archaeologists arrived,
Everyone understood
That a new generation would bear
Witness to Huitzilopochtli’s historic atrocity,
That Mexicans and the world would stare in
Mute horror at
The lengths to which Your
Brother would go to
Increase his likes,
Grow his brand,
Expand his platform.
The legends are unclear what, exactly, was the
Inciting incident,
Why the fearsome
God of War, the furious
Hummingbird of the South
Would raise his xiuhcoatl, his
Lightning serpent blade,
And commit that act of
Cosmic sororicide.
Some say that You were scandalized by Your
Mother’s questionable morals,
That You took offense to her
Womb giving shelter to Your
Glorious and beautiful and conceited
Brother, with his sparkling
Quetzals and obsidian-bladed
Macuahuitl and impossibly graceful
Wardance.
Who in the actual fuck did he think he was?
Some say that You foresaw his greatness, and
resented the
Earth Goddess’s sluttiness,
and decided to
Stand on business before
Shit got out of hand.
Others claim that You feared Your
Brother’s boldness,
That he would have the
Audacity to claim guardianship of an
Entire people and
Demand that they pick up sticks and
Abandon Snake Mountain and
Strike south for the Altiplano, where the
Mexica would one day claim their
Destiny.
Those people say that
Your only crime was
That You didn’t want to leave
Nayarit or Sinaloa or
Sonora or California or
Wherever the hell
Aztlán was.
You just wanted to stay home,
And lazily spread Your
Starry arms
And gently twirl forever
And ever.
In 1978, the
Scholars stood over Your
Corpse, scandalized at the
Sight of Your
Breasts and
Warrior’s belt
Pulled tight across Your
Bare torso that had been separated from Your
Arms and Your
Legs and Your
Head, Your exposed
Bones betraying
That most arrogant Secretary of War’s
Sloppy butchery.
And Your brother’s acolytes were nothing
If not creative, for
No other people in the history of
Humanity possessed such a
Genius for marrying
Gore with beauty,
Savagery with purpose, and
Cruelty with fate.
For Your first fifty years
You lay at the
Foot of a temple dedicated to
Tlaloc and—of all people—
Your belligerent Brother.
Captured warriors would be
Made to tread upon the
Massive disc of Your
Stone body,
Compelled to endure the
Foreshadowing of their own
Fates,
Forced to consider,
As they ascended the temple steps,
Whether they would find any comfort in
Knowing that they,
Like You,
Would soon know how it felt to be
Free of head and limbs,
Terrorized into accepting that,
In the end,
Your Brother and his raging
Mexica Children would always win.
Always.
And then,
For four hundred and fifty years,
After the conquerors came and
Pretended as though their form of
Bloodshed was more civilized than
Our form of bloodshed,
After Your miscegenated descendants
Grasped at social status by denying
Any knowledge of You,
Washing their hands of Your
Brother’s crime.
After neo-indigenous
Raza Cósmica revolutionaries
Romanticized Your victimhood and
Western feminists pathologized Your
Murder and claimed
You as their sister.
After all that,
You squinted and blinked into the
Harsh workmen’s lights and
Whispered, as a windchime might
At the nudge of a breeze from a
Hummingbird’s wings,
Quiúbole, pendejos,
I’m back!
BIO: Tomás Baiza is originally from San José, California, but now finds himself in Boise, Idaho. He is the award-winning author of Delivery: A Pocho's Accidental Guide to College, Love, and Pizza Delivery (Running Wild Press, 2023), A Purpose to Our Savagery (RIZE Press, 2023), and Mexican Teeth: Stories and Assorted Artifacts of an Errant Chicanidad (Inlandia Books, 2026). Tomás's work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best American Short Stories, and the O. Henry Prize, and both Delivery and Mexican Teeth have been accepted into the holdings of the Library of Congress Center for the Book. Sherman Alexie has called Tomás's writing “painful, scary, hilarious, incredibly vulnerable, and powerful in equal measure.” Tomás has been stalked by wild dogs while hitchhiking in Mexico, was once escorted by security out of the Pebble Beach & Tennis Club, and had the privilege of delivering a dozen pizzas to a Klingon-themed orgy at a sci-fi convention.