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By Marcus Clayton
rascacielos son arbol con ventanas. lo siento. papi says to say, “skyscrapers,” because that is what we are supposed to call them now. people inside the trees see us fly. we fly to them—papi says “asi es como aceptan.” hummingbirds sing inside the crown. el sol de ellos es mio tambien. i want to rest on their boughs to watch the sun the way they do, un feliz perezoso asleep in the security of skyscrapers Heredia could not grow.
***
The red eyed tree frog lives in the rainforests of Costa Rica. Eyes glow the color of blood to ward off hunters, to make them believe frogs can eat a lion whole. It climbs branches with suction cup toes and can reach the tops of leaves with ease. Its skin blends into these leaves to hide from predator teeth, to become foliage, to pretend to be Earth.
The red eyed tree frog only looks for a partner in the rain. Gray clouds ward off heat and liquid helps to slip out of claws. When red eyed tree frogs mate, they wait until nightfall. They wait for stars to be the only eyes that stare back into the red—the non-violence is an aphrodisiac. When they are good and ready, they lay eggs on the underside of leaves, hanging just above the safety net of water. The Earth will hold their children with its green hands, a midwife grown from the dirt.
***
Mamá is 42, and she hates dogs. “We had a German Shepard for six years before you were born,” she told me. “His name was Ace. Big, loud, and he scared the neighbors. The white people on the block would look at Ace with fear, then look at us with disappointment that we had that giant beast in our yard. The holes he left in the grass and the bite marks carved into our Sarchi chairs kept me from wanting to go outside when he was awake.
“But your grandparents loved Ace. Papi said every good American family had perritos, I guess. He said the white people looked at us with jealously, that they wish they had a dog so big. They wish their dog could hop a 6-foot gate in a single jump to scare off thieves. He said they should feel lucky Ace didn’t jump over and eat the gringos that gave us attitude.
“Over time, he tore up more of the home and had accidents more frequently. Pieces of all our Sarchi furniture were scattered everywhere like dust, and Ace’s gums bled with papi’s precious grass caught between the teeth. Our family started feeling the embarrassment I felt whenever Ace would do something destructive. We got the wrong kind of attention from the gringos. I don’t remember what the last straw ended up being—maybe mami’s patio smelled too much like pee—but I remember the day we gave him away everyone cried except me. I was excited when Ace’s new family pulled up to the driveway; the smiling almost hurt me.”
Mamá told me this story every time I even hinted at wanting a pet. However, I was an only child by blood, so the desire for extra companionship could never fully extinguish. Once, in my early teens, I told Mamá I wanted a Jack Terrier Russel. They are small and friendly and cannot intimidate passersby if they tried. I went to bookstores and libraries to read up on taking care of Jack Terrier Russels, and gave her an encyclopedic rundown of just what it entails. She refused because they pee on things.
“That’s what perritos do,” she said. “Pee on things.”
Mamá hated any mess she didn’t know how to immediately clean up, especially by babies and dogs: neither can speak to Mamá the way she knows how to speak. Accidents will happen, and she will be forced to clean up after a creature who had no chance of telling her what they truly wanted. “At least babies grow up and learn how to speak,” she’ll say. “Animals don’t talk. They just pee on things. Peeing when they’re not supposed to. They don’t have words, just violent barks.”
“I still don’t know Spanish,” I often reminded. “Does it make me an annoying baby when you’re talking to grandma and I don’t know what you’re saying?”
Mamá never taught me Spanish, often blaming Pops—“he never learned Spanish either, so he didn’t want us talking shit behind his back,” she’ll say, passively blaming his blackness. Other times, she’ll begin to retell her story of coming to America in the third grade, then stop to say, “I just wanted you to avoid some stuff I went through coming here.” By the time I made it to grade school in South Gate, the whites had flown. I was not only the one kid in school who did not know Spanish, I was also one of the only kids who whose family didn’t have a dog.
Instead of a Jack Terrier Russel, I was gifted a turtle. His name, at first, was Squirtle. Then I turned thirteen and his name was Mortimer. My parents could never stand the smell of his tank, and I said, “I’ll clean it in a second,” too often. Pops cleaned it for me when I took too long to get to it, and eventually stopped waiting for me altogether. I started to forget how to take care of Mortimer, forgot how to clean his tank, never learned what kind of food he liked best. Eventually, he stopped being Mortimer and just became “my turtle,” then “the turtle.” Within a year, Pops got fed up with cleaning after the turtle when I didn’t. One night, an unfortunate father-son blow up led Pops to take the tank out on to the street and leave it by the curb where families left box springs and used furniture to be given away. Between the reticence of Pops and I, Mamá let a passing and curious family keep the turtle. Pops was horrified, hoping to bring the turtle back in after I had learned my lesson. I spent the night crying, losing out on a pet that I barely touched. Mamá was fine, watching her shows and laughing the night away as though nothing happened.
I still wanted a Jack Terrier Russel. I knew I could love it despite the pee. I knew I could look beyond the panting and barks to hear the voice of love. Though, I could never convince Mamá, who once tried to pet a friend’s dog at a birthday party—a concession, a way to see the fuss—until its teeth ate through her windbreaker’s arm.
***
This land is ____ land, this land is my land
(¿Dónde está el baño? ¿Dónde está el baño? ¿Dónde está el baño?)
from California to ___ ___ Yo(u)r_ Island
(¿Where está el baño? Where está el baño?)
From the _______ forest, to the ___ ___ waters
(Where es el baño? Where
es de baño?)
This land was made for ___ ___ me
(¿Where is ___ bathroom? ¿Por
favor?)
***
Yellow-bellied sea snakes absorb a third of their oxygen from seawater. They are marvelously slim, and they hunt for food in aquatic life. Normally, yellow is only prominent on native snake’s belly, hidden from view of red eyed predators as it slithers along surfaces. Its back, the most prominently seen feature of the snake, is a distinct brown that leaves it invisible when it moves. Some yellow-bellied sea snakes in Costa Rica, however, are completely yellow, abandoning the brown all together to remain seen within the sea. For food, the yellow-bellied sea snake can eat several frog eggs from under a leaf in just one bite.
***
Mamá is 19, and The Virgen de Guadelupe stares at her uterus. The Planned Parenthood hidden just far enough from her parent’s view is still infested with picket signs—ventriloquist dummies whittled by Bible verses translated by white kings. Nonetheless, Mamá knows she cannot have a baby right now. Pops holds his hands over her ears, and the vitriol becomes a low hum of a bad song.
Pops just turned 18 and knows his black skin makes the white protestors hate him, too. He and Mamás know race mixing would frighten her parents just as much as these protestors, would make her parents cry like the white Jesus superglued to cardboard and stood next to the clinic’s door, would disappoint her parents like the day Pops met them for the first time.
“¿Él es negro?”
“Yes! So? I love him!”
Now neither of my parents want to disappoint the elders, and they rush inside the building as though running from firebombs. Pops holds Mamá as the barks shot through protestor teeth dissolve into the mute blues and whites of scrubs and coats. They are fully muted when the red comes out of her, and she eats her screams with her thighs warmed by blood she was not ready to know. Pops cups Mamá’s ears again on the way out, but the sound is gone. Protester howls sound caught underwater, and The Virgin’s green shawl watches Mamá without judgement.
Mamá is 39, and I ask her politely for a sibling. Brother. Sister. Someone else to call her “mother.” I am confused to see her cry when I am still waiting on an answer.
***
PINCHE PERRA MALA!
PERRA MALA!
STUPIDA! PUTA! PENDEJA!
STUPIDA!
***
mi cama está llena de tierra, pero está bien. they tell me cucarachas walk on my arms when i sleep, but i do not feel them. papi says we do not need outhouses in America, that we can stay inside when storms are too loud for the bathroom. we leave soon, but for now the rain stains the outhouse with water, y mi pijamas está empapas—they cling to my body like dirt that will not wash off my skin. i wonder if America lets bug sleep without us? if toilets can be left inside while everything stays dry.
Outside, i see Heredia’s hills become light; orange streetlights are haloes, convertirse en estrellas bajo la lluvia.
***
The northern cat eyed snake, scientifically known as the leptodiera, colloquially known as, “Oh, shit! What is that?!” has a bite that only affects a human’s pain receptors as much as a bee sting since its venom is too mild to stun. No matter, when the northern cat eyed snake is hungry, and cannot find an adult red eyed tree frog, tadpoles make an exquisite alternate meal.
***
Mamá is 30 and celebrates her birthday in the hospital. I have only been alive for one month, but my lungs have already failed. It started with food unable to enter my stomach, but the wheezing frightened her the most. To this day, she doesn’t remember the diseases’ name, and maybe that’s the way to kill the poison of memory.
She watches incubators spread past the viewing window like a minefield. I am a scorched shell with napalm drool coughed out of the mouth. Nurses ask if she needs coffee, or water, or food. Mamá fights to not say, “I want air in my baby’s lungs. Can you get me that?” and instead, “no, thank you,” with barren breasts, eyes locked on her suffocating bomb.
She refuses to admit she never wanted children, never wanted a child to know how painful it is to fight to live. America was meant to let her and her family live without repairs, to be welcomed with a culture worth sharing and synthesizing. Now her newborn son is already dying. Mamá prays he will have words to say, “I am ok now,” but his mouth is coated in saliva from the violent coughs deafening the hospital.
The disease will let me live, and my stomach will have a deep scar on the right side of my abdomen. Mamá looks at the wound as a failure, a reminder of battles she wanted me to avoid whose fists found my bones anyway. Thirty years later, the scar still brands me like a prison tattoo—like any good child of an old-fashioned Latina, I keep my shirt on around her to hide the ink, keep her thinking my skin is pure.
Mamá is 31 and decides against a second child. She argues with Pops, who had hoped her now tied tubes would expel one or two more siblings for me. This lasts years, maybe even a lifetime. But Mamá doesn’t fear umbilical cords around her baby’s neck anymore. Rosary beads no longer fissure her palms. She did not leave Heredia to watch children die.
***
the american kids laugh without me.
jajajas.
my mouth is closed. i cannot make jello sound like yellow the way they want it. i cannot open my mouth fast enough to show them my tongue is the same colors as theirs. their flag—the whites, the reds, the blues, “son mios tambien!”
pero, como se dice “where is the bathroom” en ingles? no one will tell me. does it translate to, “please stop threatening my auburn hair. please stop telling me my tiara is rusted. please let me go to the bathroom because i thought i escaped the pain of storms that eat my roof like a predator. if i mutate my words into yours, make sure my babies do not make the mistake of sharing my language, will you let us go? if i turn my hair jello, will you stop laughing?”
i do not know how to talk to teacher, now my feet drown in pee—teacher thinks that’s just what i do. he confiscated my tongue when i couldn’t say his words.
a b cs erase ah beh cehs
my nose is wet with shame rubbed into pee stains.
now i see fangs instead of hummingbirds—they swim in the jello around my ankles. they hiss like bombs that take skyscrapers away from the eyes of airplanes.
***
Mamá is 60, and she never learned that the red eyed tree frog’s tadpoles—native to her motherland—can survive without permission. They will walk one day, proving they never knew what teeth felt like on their new skin. Tadpole’s eventual suction cupped limbs keep them clung to Earth. Mamá should watch them walk in the rain to find safety in the cleansing water. Maybe then, she will believe it when they learn to scale skyscrapers; they’ll make homes high in the branches where no fangs will reach their legs, where a tadpole’s eyes will adjust and scare predators the way their mother’s eyes kept them safe from yellowed bellies.
“How come you didn’t just move back to Costa Rica?” I ask her after I tell her about another failed dog. For six days in my late 20s, I cared for a Terrier mix. He was a puppy and not house trained. I lived alone and worked nonstop as an adjunct college instructor to try and make ends meet. The Terrier never listened, never learned, peed everywhere. On the third day, I tried to pick him up to stop him from biting another piece of furniture, but he slid through my hands and collided with the linoleum like a meteor. I held him afterward, the warmth in my arms begging his fur for forgiveness. On the sixth day, I gave him to a new family, relieved he was no longer in danger from being loved by me.
Mamá tells me about Ace all over again, tells me about the holes and the barking. She segues into language again, why she never taught me Spanish—how cruel third graders can be to a foreigner trying to learn how to ask for the bathroom. Now I am the age she was when I was in the hospital, and I reminisce about our family visits to Costa Rica—how free she looked speaking only Spanish to her loved ones, how dry she stayed basking under the Tico sun.
“You obviously miss it.”
Mamá doesn’t answer my question, but she shows me a picture of herself in the third grade. Here, she had been away from Costa Rica only days. Here, she didn’t know the other kids were afraid of roaches. She has dyed her hair blonde since the 80s, but here her hair is a lifegiving shade of tree bark; a Ticas’ crown whose radiance blinds the whites.
“My nose was so big here, huh?!” she asks, trying to laugh. “The kids used to make fun of that, too. Said it looked like a dog’s nose.”
“No,” I say. “Your nose is a fine nose.”
It is a perfect nose. She stands in the photo among a morning glow, soaking every bit of the sun. Here, her posture sings futures. Here, trees surround her inside the frame like a cornucopia exhaling a ripe fruit of the womb. Here, she smiles despite venom; a smile that protects her tongue from snakes. Here, she knows no English, but she is an American child who survives.
Marcus Clayton is a multigenre Afro-Latino writer from South Gate, CA, and holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from CSU Long Beach. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California and is an executive editor for Indicia Literary Journal. Some published can be seen in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Apogee Journal, The Adroit Journal, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry among many others.