In an effort to share some of the amazing work Honors College students are doing, Areté’s staff has selected a poem from Reyes Ramirez’s (’12, Political Science and Creative Writing) undergraduate thesis entitled, Ni Fu Ni Fa or, The Continuing Catharsis of Tomas de la Paz.

Climbing Taxco

Past the market, 

I ask a slouching woman how to get to the top

and she says you have to run up there

promise me you’ll run 

and I do, with the body of old dictator,

passing a church covered in pastel flowers

with a rotting janitor laughing at the color

of my skin, que blanco he says after I tell him

my name, climb those stairs and go right

left straight past Genia’s dog with a limp.

The streets are narrow and I think of you, thirst,

and how I want to surrender my body to the soreness

of the workers who must’ve carried rocks to the

tippy top to build an ever loving Christ 

arms spread as open as the eternal love they wanted 

from the mountain thick with vegetation

and indifference because whoever conquered it: did.

When I get to the top, I will spread my mother’s hair 

into the fat air, a swarm of locusts devouring

nothing, nothing at all and look into the distance

and see a man dancing, clapping, 

his knee bouncing up and down, higher and stronger

as if he will live until the end of the day

and Jesus will finally close his embrace,

whole, all the silver in Taxco shining all at once.