Green Chili

I prefer red chile over my eggs

and potatoes for breakfast.

Red chili ristras decorate my door,

dry on my roof, and hang from eaves.

They lend open-air vegetable stands

historical grandeur, and gently swing

with an air of festive welcome.

I can hear them talking in the wind,

haggard, yellowing, crisp, rasping

tongues of old men, licking the breeze.

But grandmother loves green chile.

When I visit her,

she holds the green chili pepper 

in her wrinkled hands.

Ah, voluptuous, masculine,

an air of authority and youth simmers

from its swan -neck stem, tapering to a flowery

collar, fermenting resinous spice.

A well-dressed gentleman at the door

my grandmother takes sensuously in her hand,

rubbing its firm glossed sides,

caressing the oily rubbery serpent,

with mouth-watering fulfillment,

fondling its curves with gentle fingers.

Its bearing magnificent and taut

as flanks of a tiger in mid-leap,

she thrusts her blade into

and cuts it open, with lust

on her hot mouth, sweating over the store,

bandanna round her forehead,

mysterious passion on her face

and she serves me green chili con carne

between soft warm leaves of corn tortillas,

with beans and rice--her sacrifice

to her little prince.

I slurp from my plate

with last bits of tortilla, my mouth burns

and I hiss and drink a tall glass of cold water.

All over New Mexico, sunburned men and women

drive rickety trucks stuffed with gunny-sacks

of green chili, from Belen, Veguita, Willard, Estancia,

San Antonio y Socorro, from fields

to roadside stands, you see them roasting green chili

in screen-sided homemade barrels, and for a dollar a bag,

we relive this old, beautiful ritual again and again.

Jimmy Santiago Baca