Three Poems

Nieta Heaven

            after “Pocha Heaven” by Sara Borjas

In Nieta Heaven, no one goes hungry because there is always some rice on the stove that perpetually refills itself so abuelita doesn’t have to break her relaxing to get up to feed everyone who walks in. She says mija, I love it and this is the truth but sometimes this is also bullshit because Love is a panza stuffed with mole but it is also exhausting and in Nieta Heaven, we don’t have to pretend like it isn’t anymore, that it costs nothing because it does. And that honesty makes it so Nietas maybe don’t have to grow into their abuelita’s scoliosis one day. In Nieta Heaven, the fathers, the always-mijos, get up to cook a meal or two and don’t believe their mothers when they say Estoy bien, Mijo and it teaches the Nietas not to believe them either. In Nieta Heaven, the nietas remember everything their abuelos said, in both languages. When they’re in a bind, they can play back the wisdom in digital and know they got it right. In Nieta Heaven, there is so much time. There is so much time. Everyone snuggles to sleep under cobijas as a favored pastime, and not because DWP has raised its prices and the abuelos can’t afford heat out of their fixed social security. In Nieta Heaven, Nietas don’t have to translate because their abuelos get the respect they deserve in any public place, the first time. There is plenty of abuela’s cold cream for when the nietas miss her but she is also not gone forever because in Nieta Heaven abuelos never have to die, they just get to leave the house without being scared or having to involve anyone. They get to go see their brothers and sisters and cousins because they are all still alive and there are no borders to worry and everyone can still live in Mexico if they want or stay living here but the distance is shorter and it’s not a choice between living and dying anymore and so nietas also have more connection with the pueblos their abuelos came from. The fruit. The wind. The town square. The river. The dirt. Because of this, nietas find themselves having more sensory memory than just getting excited over a pile of avocados from Michoacán at the Vons in Granada Hills. In Nieta Heaven, abuelita doesn’t have to stop taking in birds because she’s in too much pain to keep them up. Arthritis only gives abuelos an excuse to slow down when they want some “me time.” Abuelos know what “me time” is and they aren’t ashamed of it. They don’t have to spend their lives disproving the name “lazy,” even when they are at an age where other grandmas and grandpas get to be “retired.”And their nietas don’t have to nightmare about that word either. In Nieta Heaven, the nietas have time to help out their abuelos while also still being able to do what they need to do to do well in college because there is so much time. And because there is so much to carry for the nieta, some of us who never had to work at a factory in our lives because someone who loved us made sure of it, we still carry the weight of that making. We too, just like abuelito, have been where no one ever expected to see us. And in Nieta Heaven, abuelo gets to see us graduate, and there are so many graduations, even for abuelo, who only got to go to the 4^th grade but read the dictionary every night as he fell asleep. There is so much time for abuelo to read and fall asleep. Nieta Heaven is built on every word of that search. There is so much time. There is so much time.

triolet for bad news

one day we will lose everything,
even the heave of such news upon the body.
do we coil into loss or does loss beget coiling?
one day we will lose everything,
even the bad news, impermanent in its carrying.
we convince ourselves otherwise.
one day i will lose everything—
even the news, its heave, my body.

Clarita speaks to Serafin while pacing the house alone

__________

Crystal AC Salas is a Chicanx poet, essayist, educator, and community organizer. Her work has appeared in Chaparral Poetry, The Acentos Review, YAY! LA Magazine, and others. She just completed her MFA at UC Riverside. She lives in Los Angeles where she writes about the city’s landscapes of grief, remembrance, memorialized and un-memorialized spaces. She is [accidentally] working on two manuscripts.