Today's poem is by Octavio Quintanilla

Postscript
       

***

Because you have been separated from your parents, you doodle nonsense
on the margins of notebooks. You move your hand up and down the page
furiously as if something inside of you is unstitching. Or else, your hand is
quiet as if it knows it has nowhere else to go. Between a doodle
that looks like a snarling dog and one like the melting face of an old man, you
scribble, "I miss you," but in Spanish, the language in which you were first loved.

Then you write your mother's name, 'amá.
Nothing more.

You don't know yet that a contraction is a visual form of separation: m amá.

You think no one will read what you write, and so, you smear the letters with the heat
of your fingertips. A small fire. There. They are gone.

The letters are small and vulnerable. You can do whatever you want with them.

***

The American Dream howls outside of your house, calls on your parents,
and through them, calls on you. It promises books. A better life than
what you will live, here, in this country where no one in your immediate family
will be buried.

El norte, like the North Star, a promise, across a river, across a fence, across endless
highways. El norte, where you sweep dollars off the street, where you own a washer
and dryer. A TV. Where children do not go hungry. Where children learn to read
and write in English even when their mother tongues shrivel like rotten apples in their mouths.

***

Make the crossing—not north, but south—south of the Rio Grande. South
of border walls. South of God's left eye.

Find your first language, your parents as you left them, the same dirt patio
where you walked shirtless and barefoot right after a heavy summer rain.
Recover your father's shadow climbing along the side of the house built
by his own two hands; hear your mother's voice following you down
the street on days you believed yourself to be God's loneliest thought.

Here is the life you could have only lived in Spanish. The one you lived
for nine years and that English, this new second language, failed to erase.

***

You almost lost everything.
And almost has no concrete name. No proper name.
Almost doesn't have a country, a playground, an address.

Even if you own a house, you'll never have a home.
Even if you own a dresser, an invisible suitcase will always wait for you
by the door, full of the invisible objects that you will not carry.

The blue hollow of a cup singing the wet morning.
The spoon your mother put to your lips.

***

Where are you going?
Where to?
Your uprooting doesn't let you forget that you have no true ground;
the earth opens up its skin for you.
But why, then, do you still feel you don't belong?
You write all over yourself and all over the bodies you touch.
Half of you is invested in the next line; half of you is always waiting for goodbyes.
This is what your being is composed of:
Two lexicons bordered by constants:

English is never enough.
Spanish is never enough.
Language is never enough, and yet, it is the only home you truly know.
Home with broken windows.
Country where you are at least permitted to be a stranger, where you can light
a candle for yourself and not expect to see its light at the edge of sleep.

***

(Mother) 1

Where is the language that can raise its right hand
and swear to tell the truth?
Where is the language that can shape the first goodbye
of the first time you rode a bus from a small town in Tamaulipas
to a small town in the Rio Grande Valley?
If it is found, how will it tell you about this place,
about detention centers where children were held
because they could not find the American way to open
their mouths and cry for their mothers?
Some so young they could barely form the word.

Hear them trying to say no te vayas in English.
Watch them scribble their trauma on the margins of school notebooks.
Watch what they can do with two matches and a corner of dust.

Where is the language that can raise its right hand to loosen
your tongue so that you can tell the world
that you haven't forgotten?

Your whole life has been a quest to find the right words.

But you can only speak for yourself.

***

(Mother) 2

That first time you stepped on a bus that would drive you
hundreds of miles north, your little brother was with you.
He was eight. And both of you stood on the aisle of that crowded bus,
looking out the half-open window, watching your mother get smaller,
her body not waving goodbye.

If she had, half the sky would have been erased by her hand.

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Copyright © 2024 Octavio Quintanilla All rights reserved
from The Book of Wounded Sparrows
Texas Review Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission