The Nascent Days of the Action Figure

imagine you without you. imagine lopping off your fingers 
with a jigsaw, distracted by the gunfire and church bells
of a Hells Angels funeral.

here, see the market at Chapultepec, the tortas ahogadas, 
the chapulines, the hundreds of Virgens de Guadalupe 
painted onto tiles meant for gardens and labyrinths
and kitchens, the dozens of copies of Mein Kampf.

Coyote guessed that life was made in the knee and elbow 
and eyebrow and the back of the neck before Hummingbird 
pointed to Coyote’s belly.

abuse of power comes as no time like the present. beneath 
the fabric of language we’re hoping to find a kind of language 
without language, a you without you, maybe a soul.

someone’s great-grandmother is the sound of ice cubes in a jar
 full of drugstore white wine clanking against the glass, the sound
of hour-long drags from a Pall Mall that never burns out, the sound 
of a tiny fork excavating a snail’s shell for buttery flesh.

Coyote and Hummingbird eventually became angry
with one another, and Hummingbird was forced to hide under 
Eagle’s wing for protection. woman spawned humanity,
what would become the five peoples, by swallowing a louse 
that had been feeding on Coyote’s blood.

the first recorded mention of the phrase action figure
can be attributed to a newspaper in Waterloo—Iowa—and children 
allegedly making art.

in the nascent days of the action figure the oil crisis
forced toy manufacturers to shrink down the size and scale 
of the toys, rescuing the industry from the brink of oblivion.

some Ohlone versions of the creation myth hold that Coyote’s first wife 
threw herself into the ocean, transformed into a shrimp
to escape Coyote.

prior to the nascent days of the action figure, south of the Ohlone 
were the Hopi and their katsina dolls, carved from cottonwood root. 
when girls became old enough to marry,
they received a katsina doll to celebrate this rite of passage,

a katsina with a whorl on each side of her head, representing the buns 
these girls would put their hair in on the day of their wedding.

the warrior-maiden katsina, however, has only one whorl, with loose hair 
on the other side of her head. as the story goes, the maiden was preparing 
for her wedding when the enemy appeared, and with her hair half-done 
she took her father’s weapons, killed the enemy, and rescued her village.

now, imagine you without you, imagine the morning star
and the evening star aren’t one and the same, determine whether or not 
those fingers are in fact yours, imagine how safe Hummingbird
must have felt in the shelter of Eagle’s wings.

Read more from Issue 19.2.