Picture this: my heart as thick orange as manteca as we turn on Twister for what has to be the sixteenth time since 1996,   and my parents are tired of it now, but I really begged for it, for the sake of tradition;   Helen and Bill embarrassingly in love, the wind turning in circles like the witch is at it again:   the Phillip Seymour Hoffman witch, with hair like herbicide wheat fields, and a ceremonious voice   that slices right through metal. When we have enchiladas for dinner, I can’t help it—   I have two, then three, then four and a half servings with rice and even the beans   swimming in their curls of gelatinous bacon and comino; each piece hangs in the stew like a comma. Like a coconut, dad says   of my eating habits, but I had to save room for cheese, piled high and sharp, melting right into my personal nostalgia.   Meanwhile I will celebrate enchiladas: those mounds of earth going straight to the confused gut,   the gut with no country. Doesn’t Alexa Vega, the light-skinned Latina from Spy Kids, play the Oklahoma girl who sees her father   ascend the F-5 god? Later played by Helen?! Her hair is like my sister’s—   a sweet, golden brown that confuses people, but she’s the first to rant about white privilege at dinner, swinging her fork around   like a squall, until you’re at one end of the table only to end up at the other, exactly like a helpless cow.   Growing up, dad would turn on the surround sound as we took cover under the colchas, an average storm outside, our apartment   small, but sonically ambitious, and the threat not exactly there, but there all the same.   We’ve never forgotten what could have happened and could still happen at any time, and with no warning   sending us right into that Midwestern debris where the basements are filled with strange, blank faces   that rise, heavy as spoonfuls on spoonfuls of bodies. Does nature think we’re in the way,   or is it trying to solve a curiosity? Have we been chased into the eye of the eye? The fat luxury of the eye?