My tongue leather, I stumble into the Pentecostal Templo de Dios. Sunday. 
Conflagration of noon when summer scalds the turquoise paint on these stucco liquor
stores and Laundromats, and chaparral on the foothills hunkers in for the fire-season. The
sound-system crackles with the treble of rapture, as the preacher swats at the humidity of
women and children with a crimson bible.  The mothers, plump with estrus, lick honey of
the vowel that bares its fangs as the preacher, sweat-glazed and straining, shrieks
Hallelujah!  No one notices me, shivering and pale.  No one, but the preacher who
spreads his wing-span and commands: Vení…vení, pue’….  One matron bumps into me,
and commences to rotate like a cumbersome gas planet.  Another begins to babble. 
Infants, dozens of them, are wailing in the arms of their mothers who shake them in order
to cast forth the first light. I kneel, collapse face up. Tambourines rattle awake as my
tongue slithers, my gullet unleashing hundred colors.