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By Michael A. Reyes
with a line from Natalie Diaz
Michael A. Reyes is a Mexican American poet. He’s received fellowships from Community of Writers and VONA, and has poems in The Acentos Review, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Dryland, and others. He teaches at Cal State LA and is the Assistant Editor of Poetry at The Offing. Michael is working on a poetry collection about the legacies of anti-Mexican U.S. public health policy.
By Cristi Donoso Best
I
Sometimes a girl walks down the street and she’s wearing a little skirt or something. Qué chulla. Someone will whisper that. And the ll will be rough, like too many zh, zh, zhs in a row. And then you’ll be at home, sitting on your mother’s bed folding laundry, rolling socks into each other, lining up the feet just so. And there’ll be one sock left over. You’ll look in the basket, under your own body. No, it’s alone, unclaimed. And your mother will say, Dame esa chulla. She’ll take it from you and throw it over the side of the bed, with the rags. You won’t need to ask what chulla means, after that.
II
After you leave Quito, no one outside your house will call you Titi for years. Even inside, you’ll begin to be known by your new, assumed name. You’ll forget, sometimes, that you were ever called anything else. You will struggle with your new names, play with the spelling a bit. You won’t know it but you’ll be looking to carve some of the sounds away, trying to inch towards those two syllables that never stop quietly ringing inside you. One day, your brother will have a son. You’ll look into the baby’s fuzzy face, his brand-new eyes. And your brother will say to him, this is Titi. You will never give up your name again.
Cristi Donoso Best is an Ecuadorian-American writer and MFA candidate at American University. She will serve as the poetry editor for Folio Literary Journal for 2020 – 2021. Her poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Entropy, and others. Originally from Quito, she lives outside Washington, DC. You can find more of her work at cristidonoso.com.
By Janel Pineda
because she remembered
to unfreeze the chicken
steam the arroz
wash the dishes
and prepare snacks
for the kids
after picking them up
from school,
dinner was
always half-ready
by the time
mami got home
from her twelve-hour
hospital shift
and I’d emerge quietly
from the books
I drowned myself in
those days
when I took for granted
the things she
inevitably sacrificed:
time with friends
the basketball team
tv shows
her own homework
a childhood
learning to play
the cello
instead, she helped mami
raise the rest of us
while I wrote
she changed diapers
fixed the faucet
opened the windows
mopped the floors
took the heat
when I broke
the family camera
pulled me aside
and scolded me
for not understanding
our parents couldn’t
afford the fancy
summer programs I dreamt
begged for
and still, I’m sure
she stayed up helping
the summer mami decided
to sell burritos
every evening
after work
so she could pay
for me to go write poems
in Tennessee
years of my jet-setting
big dreaming
sleeping soundly
knowing she was
home doing
everything
that needed doing
and still she drove
six days
cross-country
alone
to watch me
descend
Old West’s steps
graduation cap
and all,
the string of roses
she spent all night sewing
draped over
my neck—
oh, hermana
I bow to you
now as I did then,
wreathed
by the grace
of every goodness
you have given me.
Janel Pineda is a Los-Angeles born Salvadoran poet and educator. She has performed her poetry internationally in both English and Spanish, and been published in LitHub, wildness, The BreakBeat Poets, Vol. 4: LatiNext, and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the U.S. among others. As a Marshall Scholar, Janel is currently pursuing dual master’s degrees in creative writing and gender studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her first poetry chapbook, Lineage of Rain, is forthcoming from Haymarket Books.
By Lucía Orellana Damacela
a remote control morning. baking shows. digitized feelings. cyber social distance. video-called closeness. the screen the new skin. some earrings and a navy sweater over pjs an ensemble. the quinoa cake pic well received in our transnational small chat group. discussing butter substitutes. how to hold things together. to make them coalesce. chia gel, ripe banana puree or applesauce. need to choose wisely, depending on what else goes there. mix and match day. then these news. my young cousins’ father suddenly died of pneumonia in my hometown. perhaps it was covid-19 related. they don’t know yet. the children gather their mourning around pictures of a bearded and rim-glassed father holding them, laying down with them on the grass. now the family holds them together. their chia gel. here at home, we bake in the evening. we make things rise.
Lucía Orellana Damacela is the author of Sea of Rocks (Unsolicited Press, 2018), inHERent (Fly on the Wall Press, forthcoming), Longevity River (Plan B Press, 2019), and Life Lines, which won The Bitchin’ Kitsch Chapbook Competition (2018). Her work has been published in both English and Spanish in more than twelve countries, in periodicals and anthologies such as Tin House Online, Carve, Sharkpack Annual, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and The Acentos Review. She tweets as @lucyda.
By Madelin A. Medina
I am not whitewashed—just self-entitled, and well equipped.
I carry White-Latina-Privilege always within reach—
in my Calvin Klein bra; between the cotton, and bare skin.
At the supermarket (owned by Dominicans) a few blocks
away from me, I like to wear the shame of gentrification.
I speak English because it’s convenient, or to pretend
I’m Gringa just because I’m bored.
And, when I feel like it, I parade myself in Latinx Pride.
I pledge my allegiance to the flag of the colonized
Latin Americas, and to the oppression for which it stands,
one Nation under hypocrisy, and justice paid-in-full
in hard cash, political favors, and exploitation.
I am not whitewashed—just self-sufficient, and resourceful.
I carry my Self at my own convenience, and on the
questionnaire I choose Other; then don’t fill in the blank.
I keep a photo of my first birthday on my cell, always
at hand, in case of an emergency—as the adequate proof
of blanqueamiento. Yellow frilled dress. Pink paper tiara.
Shared by my mother, and my father—Black, but only half.
It’s not appropriation to claim the color, but not the struggle.
Right? Because, doesn’t it count to be Black by association?
On a whim, I’ll wear my pelo bueno in box braids, and—
by fault, and technicality— it’s not really blackfishing. I’ll adopt
blackness because “I’m allowed,” and, online, it’s trending.
I am not whitewashed—just self-absorbed, and preoccupied.
I cherry pick from among my selves, and choose whichever,
at the time, best fits my needs; whatever should benefit me.
After all, there is no real effort, no shame, and no one
identity is necessary when you’re only just borrowing;
when conning is second nature, and comes so naturally.
Madelin A. Medina is a Dominican-American poet and Suicide Prevention Advocate. She currently resides in Queens, New York, with her husband, and young son. Her most recent work has appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, Dominican Writers Association, and LUNA Literary Magazine Vol. 2 Issue 2. She is also a recipient of the Nancy P. Schnader Academy of American Poets Award at Hofstra University. Visit www.madelinamedina.com.
By Naihobe Gonzalez
My people write poetry about arepas. The Venezuelan writer Francisco Pimentel once wrote: It is necessary to be from our land / To know what the arepa contains. That should tell you everything I want you to know. But I’ll expand.
On Sundays, I often wake up craving an arepa, crisp on the outside, fluffy on the inside, a perfect vessel for just about any filling. On those days, I reach for the bright yellow package of corn flour in my pantry. I knead the masa until it feels smooth; slap it between my palms like my grandmother taught me, shaping it into a round disk; lay it gently on a greased griddle hot enough to sizzle; check for its doneness—tap tap tap, like my mother taught me, if it sounds hollow at its center it’s done—and I almost forget the sorrow of losing my motherland.
I am used to scanning the world around me for signs of myself, which is a bit like looking at mirrors but seeing nothing reflected. One day last fall, as I scrolled through the Bon Appétit Instagram feed on my phone, the word arepa jumped out of the blur of curated photos and text. A “holy word,” the Venezuelan poet Juan José Churión called it. The pictured dish was not immediately recognizable (What was that preparation? Those ingredients?) but according to the caption it was indeed an arepa. I examined the photograph and carefully read over the credits: recipe by Sarah Jampel, food styling by Kat Boytsova, and photography by Laura Jean Murray. I read their names in my head in my Spanish-speaking voice, which made them sound as exotic as they felt.
I wanted to see more—of the recipe, of my culture at their hands—so I went to the website. There it was, the sole recipe for arepas, with a short accompanying article. “Once you get the hang of making them, they might be your most ‘impressive’ (shhh) weeknight meal.” Who or what was being shhhed? Ah, the secret being shared between writer and reader was that arepas are actually quick and easy to make; anyone familiar with them would surely be happy but unimpressed with being served arepas for dinner. But no one familiar with them was part of that implicit conversation. So here I am, butting in.
**
Traditionally, the flour for arepas was made with a giant mortar and pestle, a process known as pilado or piladera. Women (mostly Black and indigenous) spent hours soaking, grinding, cooking, and milling white corn, all by hand. For some, that was the main task that filled their days. The enormous labor required never stopped Venezuelans—or before Venezuela was a country, our pre-Columbian ancestors—from making arepas. The word itself is believed to come from the Cumanagoto, a Caribbean tribe that was all but extinguished by the Spanish. As of the last census, there were 112 native speakers of Cumanagoto remaining. Their dish dates back hundreds of years, long before an Italian explorer wrote about it for the first time in the mid-1500s, so eloquently describing it as a “sort of bread”. We know his name—Galeotto Cei—but not the names of the women who cooked the arepas he wrote about.
Today, we simply add water to Harina P.A.N. and we’ve got masa. Precooked corn flour hit stores in 1960, reducing the time to prepare masa from half a day to under five minutes. Who was responsible for this technological revolution that forever changed the lives of Venezuelans? In 1954, Luis Caballero Mejías was awarded patent number 5176 for “dehydrated corn flour”. Despite getting positive feedback from local areperas, he didn’t have the capital to get his business off the ground and sold the patent to Empresas Polar, a brewing company at the time. Carlos Roubicek, a Czechoslovak immigrant who worked for Polar, said he had already been exploring a similar technology and deserved credit. A century before either of them, a Polish immigrant named Alberto Lutowski had designed a motor-operated mill to automate the production of arepa flour but abandoned the idea due to lack of interest from locals. There may be some debate about which of these men’s names should go down in history books, but none of their identities is lost or ignored.
Polar launched Harina P.A.N. under the slogan “The piladera is over!” The yellow packages that lined store shelves were stamped with the face of a striking woman. Her eyes and hair are dark, her lashes long and curled, her lips red and full, her nose and chin dainty. She wears hoop earrings and a polka-dot handkerchief over her hair. Like the product she represents, she instantly became a Venezuelan cultural icon, an embodiment of our motherland. But in a country where over half of the population is of mixed white, Amerindian, and Black heritage, where the work of making arepas had historically fallen on darker shoulders, her skin is oh so fair. Marko Markoff, the Bulgarian immigrant who designed the logo, said he modeled her after the Portuguese-born entertainer Carmen Miranda, who was known to white audiences around the world as “The Brazilian Bombshell”.
It’s no accident that European immigrants are featured so prominently in this story: Venezuela’s immigration policy was designed to welcome Europeans—and keep out non-whites—for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Venezuelan intellectuals like Alberto Adriani, the son of Italian immigrants himself, argued that Venezuela needed to attract people who would “whiten the country” and “improve the race” to promote its development. Implicit in their theory, of course, were beliefs passed down from colonial days that centered whiteness as the source of goodness. In those days, this included serving bread instead of arepas at meals to communicate belonging in white society. Some whites even believed arepas caused disease. The Black and indigenous servant class, however, continued to prepare arepas, feeding them to the children they cared for when no one else was looking. A gradual shift began. In 1828, the French general Louis Peru de Lacroix wrote that Simón Bolivar—the most lauded Venezuelan in our history—preferred “the corn arepa to the best bread.” As Venezuela became its own country, free from Spanish rule, arepas were the pulsing heart of our new national identity.
**
When my mother and I moved to the suburbs of Atlanta in 1995, we were labeled Hispanic, an identity we had never considered, and found ourselves ticking off this enormous box that had been designed to conveniently comprise multiple countries and continents. Yet the main source of “Hispanic” culture around us was Mexican, with different words, music, and foods than we were used to. In the early days of making arepas here, we tested out other types of corn flours like Maseca that were more readily available than Harina P.A.N., but they yielded something different that wasn’t ours. That something didn’t taste of Sunday brunches with my grandfather or rushed school lunches or secret midnight snacks. So we drove far and wide in search of so-called ethnic stores that might sell Harina P.A.N. until we finally found the familiar yellow package on a dusty bottom shelf. A small, working mirror. Those were the days when my mother pawned her car title to cover both gas and rent, but going without arepas was not an option. We were a minority within a minority trying to hold on to who we were, learning English and all the unsaid dynamics of Southern culture while we stuffed our arepas with Mexican queso fresco and thought of the home we’d lost.
Now those yellow packages of Harina P.A.N. with the smiling woman are sold in more than 60 countries. In the United States, the packaging is written in English, Spanish, and French, in that order. It is even hawked as a health food—naturally fat and gluten-free! You can buy it online at Target, Walmart, and Amazon, where the product description promises arepas are “perfect to prepare as a substitute for bread.” But they are a substitute for nothing to me—their value is inherent rather than relative; it does not depend on the assessment of an external gaze.
It’s a costly convenience we’ve gained, this new widespread availability. Twenty years after my family moved to the United States, Polar opened an Harina P.A.N. processing plant here to meet the demand of a growing diaspora. The Texas town where they set up shop is notorious for a large sign that read: “Welcome to Greenville, The Blackest Land, The Whitest People.” (The sign was revised to read “The Greatest People” in 1968, as townspeople argued that was the intended meaning anyway.) In 2015, the same year the plant in Greenville was inaugurated, a truck transporting Harina P.A.N. flipped over in the middle of a Venezuelan highway. White corn flour dusted the asphalt like a surreal Caribbean snowfall. Dozens of people swarmed the truck, stepping over the driver’s corpse to scoop up packages of Harina P.A.N. in their arms. Some looked at his dead body, others looked away. The scene was an illustration of the desperation of people struggling to feed themselves and their children. It was an illustration of a “humanitarian crisis”, a shorthand term for a complex catastrophe that is still unfolding.
My own family is now broken up across multiple continents, forming a fragile, thinly stretched web. Siblings and cousins who grew up playing together keep in touch with the help of social media. We ship basic necessities to our relatives who remain in Venezuela—like diapers, coffee, and lollipops for my 100-year-old grandfather who is still holding on to life in a dying country—and FaceTime with them when the internet there is working well enough. When we say goodbye, we smile and pretend we’re okay even though we have no idea when or if we’ll see each other again.
You may have seen headlines about the crisis in Venezuela as you scrolled through your news feeds, lingering a little longer on the tragedies that hit a little closer to home. You may have even heard these facts: By 2019, Venezuelans reported losing an average of 24 pounds—about 11 packages worth of Harina P.A.N., or over 200 arepas. Millions had already fled abroad, becoming the second-largest displaced population in the world, after Syrians. Over 400,000 of us now live in the United States as your neighbors, and countless more of us are scattered around the globe, exiled from a country we increasingly struggle to recognize. What do these facts make you feel? For me, it’s grief. For a second time, I lost the country where I was born.
**
Skipping down to the comments section on the Bon Appétit webpage, I saw that I was not the only one feeling unsettled by their recipe. From reader M. Belen: “I don’t want to preach about the purity of arepas, but I feel like the flavor profile and cooking method is so far off that to call this an arepa would be a disservice…Next time just check in with a Venezuelan or a Colombian.” I felt like I was making eye contact with this reader—we saw each other and nodded across a virtual space. We could have had our own implicit conversation, but I wanted to bring you into the fold. You see, when I saw that Instagram post for the first time, I felt momentary pride. The mirror was reflecting something back, and even if that something looked a little warped, it was being shown not just to me, but to a whole new group of people who only ever see a part of me. But that pride was quickly extinguished by indignation upon realizing the dish had been adapted so liberally by people with little knowledge of it. Venezuelans were at risk of starvation in the very moment a professionally styled and photographed arepa—our humble food, a gift from our ancestors—appeared in a fancy magazine without context or care.
You didn’t know, of course (and how could you, when you hadn’t bothered to ask?). But what you treat so lightly often weighs on others with heft accumulated over centuries, digging into wounds still raw. Don’t you see, as you write and brag about these dishes, how they came to be available to you? Slavery, colonialism, war, oppression, famine. Human suffering, in all its forms, is the core reason why people—and their food—leave home. The mass displacement of my people is deeply painful, but it means our culture is rapidly spreading. It means you might notice a new Venezuelan restaurant in your city (though depending on where you are, it might be given a more accessible label like “Latin”). It means our food might start appearing in your magazines and social media feeds. It means you might see whiteness taking over and erasing others, as it tends to do. But let me once again borrow words from the poet Francisco Pimental:
What foreign man who does not know
How we speak here, could believe
That inside an arepa
A woman can comfortably fit?
Naihobe Gonzalez (@nai__gonzalez) is a Venezuelan-American writer in Oakland, California. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Catapult, The Believer, Waxwing, The Offing, The Acentos Review, and more. Her writing has received support from VONA, Writing by Writers, the Writers Grotto, the Kearny Street Workshop, and Tin House. She has a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University and conducts policy research when she’s not writing.
By Edwin Alanís-García
After Tom Kiefer’s Rosaries 42, Neutral
Sunblistered skin processed, almost chewed
at the gate. God once rolled in plastic
stones, each pebble a prayer carried across
2,000 kilometers of Nod. They all must go
into the evidence box, even this faux chain,
this trinket tradeable at a roadside stand
for twenty pesos. Now it’s the last kiss
from Mamá and Papá, a thin bulwark
of flaking gold paint, sweat-stained ribbon.
These beads rattle and His tongue is caught
in the clouds. All those childhood hymns
modulate into curses. Cracked hands
smelling of children and sewage. Brackish
eyes. Barbed wire. Scalding gravel rebukes. All in
doppelgänger language, venom and saccharine,
the cascabel and its kin in varied guises guide
a way to the promised land, where promises
always demand payment. This molded crucifix
was the ticket when the tolls became depraved.
Another indulgence purchased. God looks
the other way. Until concrete pillars become sanctuary.
This rosary vanishes, swallowed by new deities: Procedure.
Standard. Serpents sing in the walls, scrape the bars.
Iron songs burst into red dust. Those guard towers,
the black domes on the ceiling—echoes of what
Mother and Father used to say, that no matter where
you are, someone is always watching.
Edwin Alanís-García is the author of the chapbook Galería (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019). Their poetry has appeared in The Acentos Review, The Kenyon Review, Peripheries, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. A graduate of NYU’s Creative Writing Program and the Harvard Divinity School, they divide their time between small-town Illinois and small-town Nuevo León.
By Eva Maria Saavedra
I.
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.
V.
The other 8th 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.
By John T. Howard
Out beneath snow
beneath bluish ground frozen and hard
a mirror waits for you, in parchment,
buried
and bone and marrow,
and tooth and hair, they wait there, too,
they wait and they preach and you—you half
hear their words, little whispers, urging
murmurs
like the rustling heard
running through dark and ochered leaves,
how the branches after fall let out their doleful
empty-handed fingers into the chill
of a spineless
cold
that soughing, those
moans the lingering boles make when arguing
with the wind and that rasping complaint
waiting so long for the coming
thaw
John T. Howard is a Colombian-American writer, translator, and educator. He is Assistant Director for the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Wellspring House Retreat in Massachusetts. He is at work on a first novel, a first collection of stories, and a first book of poems.
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.