Laura Tohe

The Sacred Tortilla

When I moved to Arizona
I expected to come home to good Mexican cuisine
the kind that makes you sweat and you have to keep wiping your face.
I had been living in the Midwest eating mildly bland passable Mexican food
and all the time my taste buds were in the Southwest.
Then I moved back and dreams of green chili danced in my head
and the tortillas that I grew up with,
the kind my mother made in the enamel bowl:

                               several handfuls of flour,
                               a pinch of salt and baking powder,
                               just enough water to make the dough soft.

Then she kneaded it and let it rise under a white dishtowel.
When it was ready she pinched off soft white balls,
rolled it in her hands, stretched it,
and slapped it back and forth into round thin shapes until
it looked as flat as a full moon.
Sometimes she placed it on my little brother’s face  
so that he looked like the man in the moon.
He giggled
and we with him.
Then she placed the tortilla on the cast iron skillet.
It was one of the prized possessions of a Navajo woman
to have a skillet that faithfully receives the food for cooking.
The tortilla covered the entire skillet
and like an artist
she could sense time in her hands,
knowing when to turn it 90 degrees
the way my grandmother taught me.
She moved the tortilla around the skillet
and at just the right moment
flipped it over.
It looked like the surface of a planet that NASA beamed back to earth.
Sometimes craters broke out on the surface
but it was my mother’s tortilla
with it’s dark brown toasted spots.
A woman once discovered the face of Christ in her tortilla.
The priest was called in to bless it,
and the people stood in lines to wonder at it.
Tortillas are sacred.

My Eyes are Small

                                                               An homage to the Grand Canyon

my eyes are small;
      they take only tiny licks at the walls of this canyon
my ears pick up my late brother’s steps cracking on the Kaibab trail
my voice a whisper,
      a feather drifting on the wind
and yet my soul immense with the millennia of rocks and stars,
rises,
rises,
rises,
rises