35. Mal de Ojo
I still feel the glass against my cheek from that train ride
the way you pressed my face against the window and laughed.
Your breath was hot, the city outside melting like burnt sugar.
The danger wasn’t the glass shattering; it was the lesson in physics –
learning how much pressure I could take before you decided to break me.
In my grandmother’s house, we feared Mal de Ojo.
She said some eyes don’t just see, they devour.
They wither the fruit on the vine; they sour the milk.
You watched me like that.
A gaze so heavy it left a bruise long before you ever did.
The shower was still running
when you dragged me out,
my feet slipping as your hands found my throat.
You laughed again.
You liked me unsteady
a bird with clipped wings, thanking the cage for the view.
I pressed those bruises later,
watching the colors bloom like ink in water,
convinced it was just your touch finding its way back home.
I called you the architect of my wreckage.
I built a cathedral from damp towels,
the ash on the sill, the mug you cracked and never replaced.
Cathedrals don’t rise by accident.
I see it now: I was the scaffolding.
that held the weight while you played at being God.
In Galicia, they whisper of the Santa Compaña
the procession of the dead that wanders the mist,
looking for a living soul to hand a cross –
forcing them to lead the march until they wither away.
That’s how you left me
carrying a candle that was burning me to the wick.
And yet, I grieve.
I wake tasting smoke from a fire I didn't start.
I want you gone; I want the weight of you back.
The cracked mug still sits on the counter.
I leave it there as a monument,
proof that a vessel can break.
But water still remembers how to flow.
Brock Cooley is a Melbourne-based poet.