yo te sigo queriendo
scholarship application: write about a famous villain & why viewing their humanity’s important
when you think of yolanda saldívar, you picture a bitter old bitch stuck in her little carcacha, tears gobsmacked to her cheeks, holding a pistol to her temple, howling, i didn't mean to hurt her. my heart is a weapon that acts alone. maybe you hear the sirens around her. see the police officers standing beside their cars, pistols whipped out & ready to shoot. you'll probably focus on blood & bullet holes, a body on the floor, selena quintanilla leaking—first onto the pavement. her insides, oceandeep. collected by forensic teams & then later scrubbed away by a hotel maid, who may be humming one of selena's tunes: cause i'm dreaming, of you tonight.
you'll see the ambulance: the medics administering oxygen into selena's mouth, placing white bandages onto her abdomen, q-tipping her wounds. you won't detail the surgery or count all of the wormholes the doctors make into selena's body because you'll picture selena's mother, eyes puffy, fists clenched around crumpled tissues, screaming at nurses, please, please let my baby stay. you'll only have a flash of her father, see how he's splitting his lip open with his teeth. your thoughts will whisk away by the heart monitor going flat in the operating room, loud. startling. perhaps even louder than the bullets yolanda shot into selena, because a heart beat lost is louder than anything.
you want yolanda to rot. to stay in jail. maybe you even hope she kills herself. it's what she deserves, you say. how else can you hang up your teardrops to dry if she's still alive? & i'll tell you this: people are hurricanes, like my tia ninfa, who i used to mistake for yolanda growing up because they share the same face. a woman who pushed my mother down a flight of stairs during a fight, a woman my siblings ran from, a woman who once gently caressed foam out of my eyes in the bath, & said. mijo, it's okay to be soft. not like other boys. you just have to remember: you have a sun inside you. hold your hand to your chest to feel its warmth. don't ever let someone steal it. promise me.
Feature Date
- July 14, 2020
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Copyright © 2019 by JJ Peña
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
JJ Peña is a queer, burrito-blooded writer living & existing in El Paso, Texas. He is the winner of Blue Earth Review‘s 2019 flash fiction contest, CutBank‘s 2019 Big Sky, Small Prose contest, & Mythic Picnic‘s 2020 Postcard Prize. His work has been nominated for best micro-fiction, best small-fiction, is included in the best microfiction 2020 anthology, & Wigleaf Top 50 (2020). His stories have appeared in, or are forthcoming from, Hobart, New Delta Review, Wigleaf, The Kenyon Review, & elsewhere. He holds a BA in both English and Anthropology, & an MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. He serves as a flash fiction reader for Split Lip Magazine.
Issue 65
Tempe, Arizona
Arizona State University
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Tucker Leighty-Phillips
Poetry Editor
Maritza Estrada
Founded in 1986, Hayden’s Ferry Review is a semi-annual, international literary journal edited by the MFA students at Arizona State University. Work from Hayden’s Ferry Review has been included in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Poetry, and Best New Poets. HFR has notable pieces in Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Mystery Stories, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology.
Hayden’s Ferry Review looks for well-crafted work that takes risks, challenges readers, and engages us emotionally and artistically. A small portion of our publication is solicited from established authors, while the majority of our contributors are chosen from the thousands of manuscripts we receive each year.
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