My Ancestors Saw Revolution, Too
Wouldn’t it be marvelous to be swallowed
by the mangrove roots of my ancestral tree
until silt surrounds me and drops my body
into a horribly recognizable abyss?
Mis antepasados podían ver las trincheras,
hasta olerlas presagiando la muerte de
milicianos y milicianas, un grito
que emana desde la panza de una revolución
que se convierte en olas de inmigrantes
cáscaras de fusiles enviadas a España en plena guerra
y trenzas que luego inspiran a
la princesa Leia de Star Wars, una verdadera miliciana.
My ancestors could see the trenches,
could even smell them foretelling the death
of militiamen and women, a shout
emanating from the belly of a revolution
that turns into waves of immigrants,
gun shells sent to Spain during the Civil War,
and braids that would later inspire
Princess Leia from Star Wars, a true fighter.
The conflicts mount casualties, turn
family fortunes into worthless plastic jewelry,
and the piercing eyes staring back at me
look just like my own, beams of light
emitted from abyss to ocean to cityscape
from a million light years and nebulae away.
¿Qué ofrendas debo realizarles, los que vieron
los fantasmas saliendo de fusiles y cuerpos podridos,
los que supuestamente corrieron por sus vidas?
What offering should I make for them, those souls
who saw ghosts leaping from guns and decaying bodies,
the ones who supposedly ran for their lives?
The mangroves bring me to my knees,
staring up at a sky left unchanged
as Earth and water lap at my shins
until my legs go numb and I feel
the stillness these once revolutionaries became.
Wrong Side of the Taco Line
You learn which side of the taco line you’re on pretty quick
as you drive through the Bay Area in search of dinner,
as you walk through your hometown,
as you wonder about your proximity to the border,
as you accidentally spell México in Spanish as Méjico,
as you pronounce Mexico and your own last name in English.
When we stopped at the gringo place somewhere near San José,
the place with plastic papel picado
and American news and sports on the TVs,
I couldn’t stop wondering about the other
place you can get tacos,
the one with little décor and only two tables.
The place where you can order in Spanish
without over emphasizing the vowels,
a place I’ve never been.
I know not to walk on the wrong side
of the taco line, learned to listen carefully
when a flash of recognition leads
to a chance encounter in a grocery store
and I’ve forgotten to use usted again.
I know the frontera is both real and imagined,
erecting itself at inopportune moments
yet lowering for me to slowly see
the life my family once had,
waiting for me in the distance of
language classes, self-acceptance, and pride
on a table set with elote and the street tacos
I’d one day be able to eat.
Furiously Bilingual
You see, before I became furiously,
lovingly, locamente bilingüe,
inventé palabras donde no las había,
I sang odas and made-up songs
I imagined as corridos with only
the conjugations of ser in the present tense.
I unspooled adjectives as if they were the threads
of my árbol genealógico, wrapped them around
commonplace objects like casa, lápiz, pueblo,
creating a quilt in my mind I could place over my shoulders
to find a home amongst Berlitz, WordReference,
and 501 Spanish Verbs.
The day I said “se le cayó,” I surprised myself.
You see, I had said something without realizing it,
put together pronombres in a way I hadn’t done before
among the grammar drills reminding me not to
“lay low”/le lo in a sentence.
I made new friends in a language I once saw as
out of reach, tucked away in a past with rules
and customs my elders never explained.
If this country could take our words,
our accent, almost take the erres and elles off
my own tongue, so too
could I become an estudiante.
I would study hard, memorize late into the night
until I began to soñar en español.
You see, I end my emails with “un abrazo,”
saludo con dos besos con mis amiguis en Madrid,
codeswitch across América, make mistakes and
fall in love all over again
when I start learning português.
Angela Acosta
She is a bilingual Mexican American poet, Ph.D., and Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of South Carolina. Her creative and academic work centers on imagining possible worlds and preserving the cultural legacies of women writers. She is a 2022 Dream Foundry Contest for Emerging Writers Finalist, 2022 Somos en Escrito Extra-Fiction Contest Honorable Mention, and Rhysling finalist. Her writing has appeared in Copihue Poetry, Shoreline of Infinity, Apparition Lit, Radon Journal, and Space & Time. She is the author of the Elgin-nominated poetry collections Summoning Space Travelers (Hiraeth Publishing, 2022) and A Belief in Cosmic Dailiness (Red Ogre Review, 2023). She has published on female life-writing, poetry, and literary personas in Persona Studies, Ámbitos Feministas, and Feminist Modernist Studies.
More of her work is available to read here: https://www.chillsubs.com/user/a314acosta