I dig the grave in a light rain. It’s a small hole for Paco. Elsewhere in the world, people I love have suffered losses that brought down the sky. Here, in the central highlands of Mexico, I bury my cat. He was Paco. His namesake is my grandfather, who eloped from Guatemala to New York…

  this is the stone drenched in rain that marks the way –Santōka (1882-1940)     Church bells are ringing in San Miguel, all of them, for the last ten minutes. This cobblestone city is 500-years old and it feels medieval, these bells filling the air, tolling the last public Catholic mass as we await…

Part I I find her sitting under a tarp on the corner of Cinco de Mayo and Las Moras, selling nopal salad and avocados, her greying black hair, straight hair very long, covered with a head cloth. She wears a blue sweater for the morning chill, a flowered apron underneath, brown hands moving deliberately, trimming…