By Cindy Lamothe

From the wild sea in Honduras. Said she
needed to rid herself of old skin. I knew better.
She needed to be rubbed raw by her country.
Smoothed over by its rough edges. Between us
is an ocean unmoored by two shores, a body
composed of separate masters. Women, we are more
snake-like than we think. Shedding secrets that surface
only in light and abrasive strokes. Sometimes for hours,
she scraped, collagen and tissue running down bare ankles.
In the soft morning light, everyone is born again, they say.
My mother kept the pumice stone for years after,
discarding her dead cells into the shower's sewage.
Leaving traces of herself on the white man's land.

Cindy Lamothe is a biracial Honduran-American writer living in Guatemala. Her work has appeared widely in publications including Catapult, Guernica Daily, The Rumpus, Narratively, Hunger Mountain, Tiferet Journal, among others. She is currently at work on a memoir exploring her multicultural identity and experience growing up between worlds. Find her on Twitter @CRLamothe or at her website www.cindylamothe.com