Cōātlīcue

"I saw her in mexico city after a day of walking around the outskirts of the upper-class zone of the city. A year after the big earthquake the buildings are still tumbling, great heaving cracks in their facades, thirty floors of vacant offices, burst windows, potted plastic palms and calendars flapping above dead machines. I saw her after a day filled with rich people and poor people; a day of diamond rings on lifeless fingers; a day of armless and legless men in the dawn (I saw the missing limbs for a fraction of a moment, suspended against the blue exhaust clouds of the city streets).

I saw her. She's about eight feet tall and she has the twin feet of an enormous eagle and both her arms are large serpent's heads and tongues tasting the wind and her head, they told me, had been cut off by her brother somewhere in the skies years ago in some struggle for power and now she carries her dry skull in the center of her massive belly and where her head had been were now two large serpents symbolizing the flowing of blood and around her hips she wore a skirt made entirely of snakes, dozens of them. Around her shoulders she wore a necklace of rope that was strung with human hearts and human hands and they told me she was the goddess of the earth and they told me she was the goddess of life and death and I was amazed at how seductive she was"

David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, 77