Doña Marina was Hernán Cortés’ translator and interpreter and mistress at the time of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec (Mexica-Coloa) people. She was also known as La Malinche and Malintzin, names derived from the day in the Aztec calendar on which she was born, Malinalli, which means a kind of seeded grass. Her translations from her native language Nahuatl into Maya, and later, directly into Spanish, were an important key to the conquest.

First Voice 

Hear her: she is breathing.
Breath in, Nahuatl;
breath out,
      Maya.
Hair flails from her mouth:
taste the fragrant oil on it.
Shutters clap across the green:
open, Maya; closed,
      Spanish. 
    

I. Hummingbird: Marina

It was my name-day. I was five or six. But I remember
      this—
I broke the neck of a baby hummingbird.
Flung from the nest
for faults divined by the hen: a twisted wing bone,
an ill-formed bladder?                   
I saw its throat wobble by the silk-cotton tree.
The sky was candled by the moon.
My hands moved, a doubled arc.   
I held my palms out for the gods, the silken
down and a little blood adhering,
      and I thought—
Now I’ll never be that wrinkled belly in the dust.   
 

II. Heart: Marina  

I grew. When the rush, hush of dragging feet woke me and the candle’s star that pierced my door’s opening strode in, I addressed them directly, knowing why they came. I saw the lizards of my dreams padding forward on their stones, and in their circle flew the lavish moth, which fluttering out the window, hissed the name of Xicalango. The slave traders’ port. There are ways to kill a child, and there are ways to exile her from her heart so completely, she is dead. My body wore a many-coloured cloth. Then I was torn from it.

Second Voice 

She is wailing, beats her head with stones. 
She would not tell you this.
Her birth was ill-starred; it was prophesied.
She would not tell you this.
Step father kissed her on the mouth last night.
She would not tell you this.
She thinks the gods have made a bet on her.
She’d tell you this.  
 

III. Xicalango: Marina  

i. 

Sticks and stones I gather for this lord
who loans and repossesses me.
I bend and stab with herons in the mud, I poke for crabs
among the roots, as if I had no rank.
A stone dislodges from a lava bed.
Prodigal piece of firework, must it be driven,
storm by storm, toward the river bed?
And if that stone’s a girl?   

ii. 

Something builds across the skies today: a bent
to which the maize submits. These are the wind
bridges which the gods may use to visit us.
If they should come to break us,
I’ll desire them, I’ll arch. Grass is
as grass does: for this, I blame my mother.
Why not delay my birth with herbs,
or bring me out sooner?
Storms build across the skies. The rats have come
to take their young to higher ground,
biting gently on their necks. The scarlet flowers
throw old petals at my feet.
As a child, I saw a youth tumble down
the temple steps: limbs beautiful, his heart
torn out and burned. Cihuacoatl
needed flesh to eat, they said. 
This much, I understood:
if the gods weaken, we’ll be left alone on earth.
 

Forthcoming in Event, Salt Publishing, 2007.