After Reading “To Fall in Love with Anyone Do This”

By Eva Maria Saavedra

Which came first the inhale
or the exhale because it’s unclear
when smoking cigarettes. It’s like aging
and forgetting what you asked
of the other. Context clues,
you say to yourself until
you become so lost
in the conversation
you might as well be stranded
on la Panamericana Norte.
I learned I’m the type
to hitchhike when
I first moved to Brooklyn
and got drunk with my college
roommate. At the end of the night
I jumped into a cab that had no idea
where it was going. You don’t want
to appear lost so you smile and ask
to be dropped off at the next corner.
You realize you’re 10 blocks from home.
A man in a pick-up truck pulls up
next to you and he offers you a ride.
He drove me home and my white boyfriend
at the time scolded me. Why didn’t you
call me. Because I couldn’t trust
you to stop a political phone
call to come get me. I’ve stuck it out
in our relationship because parts
of me like being the novelty.
I don’t feel like I have much
to give so I give you caricature
and you eat it up. See what I did there?
I prefer flight to fight.

II.

The first time I visit the Brooklyn
Museum is because I’m dating
a man that works there.
We’re walking through the Arts
of Americas Collection and
I’m always put off a little
by the sterile space of a museum
and my ancestry. Being put on display
makes me uncomfortable,
almost freakish. On the wall
to our left hang two
paintings one of Guadalupe
and next to it a depiction
of four Inca Kings. He says
my ancestry is on this wall
next to your ancestry and I feel
the way I did when first called
querida. As if this was written
on our palms, and the palms
of the people that came before us.
I say I’m the kind of woman
to go down for copyright
infringement. You say there’s a possibility
you’d be arrested for counterfeiting money,
a reference to your graduate school thesis
or the time you attempted to monetize your art;
the things we do just as well
as breathing and sex and switching
languages in the middle of speaking.

III.

A student wanted to pour a cup
of juice over my head today.
As he inched closer to me
the juice dripped onto the desk.
I said stop, Daniel, stop
look at what you’re doing
mira, mira. I know that bit
of Spanish squeaked through
because there are parts of me
that no longer feel foreign.
When we settle into bed that night
I say I was a mouthpiece
at the age of eight and N. says I know
as he pulls me in snug against his chest.

IV.

White ex-boyfriend referred to in the first section:

Hey
keep your selfies and talk of your dumb boyfriend to yourself please. I'm dating two people but I still don't wanna hear about that shit. I just sent you the Frida pic because it was so relevant to you and I knew you'd like seeing a somewhat less caricatured version.

Sent from my iPhone

I would say I’m sorry, but I never fathomed
it’d take more than one woman
to fill the space I created when I left.
Also, I’m not sorry.

The other 8^th grade teachers tell
me my students like me.
They don’t call you a bitch,
that means they like you.

VI.

Noé assures me my first language
was Spanish and I say I don’t recall
ever looking at a white face
and being confused by the sounds
their mouths made. I would say my first
language was an ocean named
the Pacific or a stillness
I could never shake. Regardless,
let’s settle on Spanish because nothing
can grow from ambiguity.
My colleagues tell me
your kids are slow, you’ll need to skip
some of this text. When I’m with my students
this narrative is difficult to accept
because ambiguity means open
to interpretation, a possibility
not everyone can understand.

Eva Maria Saavedra is a Peruvian-American poet, educator, and mother born and raised in New Jersey where she currently resides with her son, Mateo Rafael. She received a BA from SUNY Purchase and an MFA in writing and translation from Columbia’s School of the Arts. Her chapbook, Thirst, was selected by Marilyn Hacker for the Poetry Society of America’s 2014 New York Chapbook Fellowship. She’s working on her first full-length manuscript of poems.