I ask Abuelita to tell me a story about hands
By Mercedes Lucero
Photography by Julia Cassell.
and she tells me the story of how she almost drowned. How on an early winter morning in Colorado, she missed the bus for school. Had to hop in the passenger seat of the Ford, the one her two older brothers took. Books in her lap. The eldest brother driving and another behind her in the back seat. The drive to the school is not very far, but the windshield, no matter how often they try to wipe it from the inside with the palms of their hands, becomes harder and harder to see through. Beside them, snow rests in white piles along a black road. Through the frosted windshield, Abuelita sees not the car moving along the road, but the road, moving farther and farther away. She wants to mention this to her brother, but before she can, the car, with the three of them inside, goes over the bridge and into the freezing canal below. One can almost drown like that, with rushing water moving like ice into every fissure, touching the skin like cold linen. She will wake up on wet pavement, lying on her back with her brothers beside her, the back of the car jutting up from dark water. Everyone will remark how the windows were rolled up. How the doors were sealed shut. Everyone will tell a different story about how they made it out, but the true story, she says, is the one her mother told her: The hands of angels pulled you out.
About the Author
Mercedes Lucero (she/they) is an Afro-Latinx writer and the author of Stereometry (Another New Calligraphy 2018). They are the winner of the Langston Hughes Creative Writing Award for Poetry and a finalist for the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry. Their work has been featured on The Project on the History of Black Writing and published widely including in New Orleans Review, New Ohio Review, Puerto del Sol, Fourteen Hills, Paper Darts, The Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row Journal, The Pinch, and Heavy Feather Review among others. See more of her work at www.mercedeslucero.com.
Julia Cassell
About the Photographer
Julia Cassell lives, studies, and photographs in Western Massachusetts and Brooklyn, NY.
A Celebration of LGBTQ Writers & Artists
Taken from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and the poem “Rooms,” our series title appears in the line: “Cadences, real cadences, real cadences and a quiet color. Careful and curved, cake and sober, all accounts and mixture, a guess at anything is righteous, should there be a call there would be a voice.”
All Accounts & Mixture is CutBank’s annual space for queer writers and artists, and we’re incredibly proud and honored to present this year’s bunch of daring, earnest, and straight up wild pieces. Our sincerest thanks to the contributors, as well as to each and every submitter to this year’s feature. Reading your work is a privilege, one we hope to continue undertaking for a long while.