FOR THE LATINX RESEARCH CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
Revista N’oj Issue 5: The Body, Spring 2023
There is a distance
between the sounds in English,
the sounds given at the cost of your roots,
paid with the cost of a mortgage,
a home, of your parent’s sweat and anxiety,
and of the sounds of Spanish,
for what crawls inside of you.
English, for you, tore up
your weaving to your home
since the moment you stepped into
the confinements of its institution.
English tore up the arpilleras
that connected you to different spaces,
to different eyes,
your own family.
English allowed you to feel yourself
in a different skin,
richer and whiter and full of Earl Grey tea,
gave you refuge
in the lemony notes of black leaves
allowed you to forsake el té con canela y cedrón.
English severed the knitting to your family,
the knit that also asphyxiated you,
the knit that also told you the only option you had
was to be a mother or to be a suicide.
English gave you a space to talk
about her, she that crawls
underneath your skin,
without having to name her in Spanish.
Porque cómo explicarla en español,
esta mujer que planta y destruye,
que habita sin ser invitada.
Porque cómo hacer crecer de tu boca las flores,
los jardines, que habitan el rojo interior de tu piel,
raw, los órganos abiertos.
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English