ISABELLA RAMIREZ

Spoken Word | Alexander W. Dreyfoos School of the Arts, West Palm Beach, FL

Mama

i’m sitting on my mama’s bed and she’s on the brink of breaking down over her homework. i can see the glint of a blinking cursor in the tears glossing over her eyes as her hands search for words in a language all too foreign to her. she said i could count in both Spanish and English by the time i was 18 months old but it's taken her 21 years and counting to flatten out the unruly kinks of her language. my mama’s English is a stubborn wine stain on a white dress. she scrubs at her twisted tongue desperate to clean the spice, el cilantro, la salsa that is her accent. her accent is the tambourine she hides in the back of her mouth behind the ivory piano keys that are her teeth she speaks a merengue, bachata, ranchera, tonada1 that she mutes to make room for her English. my mama’s English gets told it's pretty good for being an immigrant to which she replies you’ve got some nerve for being a gringa2 because my mama wasn’t a stay-at-home mom for fifteen years to be told that her English needed housekeeping. the beauty of my mama’s English is that she doesn’t need it to knock your head off your shoulders call her a luchador ‘cause she can make you tap out faster than you can say her English isn’t good enough. my mama’s English is me correcting her at the dinner table it’s me laughing when she can’t find the right syllables and sounds and the words don’t fit quite right in her mouth. it’s the downturn of her lips at the expense of my smile because her English is not the punchline of a joke that’s gotten too old. my mama’s English is the piñata she got me on my 10th birthday big and bright and pink and purple but hollow on the inside. it’s her count to three uno, dos, tres4 as she spun me blindfolded dizzy and facing the wrong direction. it’s the swing and miss of my bat and the candy and confetti that falls in the final hit that breaks it open. it’s a game of pin the tail on the donkey no matter how many times you play you never just get it quite right. it’s the quinceñera I never had overrated and stereotypical distastefully too latina. it’s the number birthday candles that melt hot wax onto the cake she made from scratch. it’s the reason my birthday is not just a happy birthday but a feliz cumpleaños.5 it’s the reason that when i go to my friend’s parties i want to sing happy birthday twice because mama never let us blow out candles before singing en Español.6 my mama’s English is the one dollar and 35-cent Cuban coffee i drive her to get every saturday itching at the back of her throat bitter and hard to swallow only sweet from the sugar left in the foam she licks off her top lip. it’s the reason she insists the starbucks double espresso doesn’t have the same kick. it’s the reason i’m sitting on mama’s bed watching her eyes swell as she fumbles with the keys. it’s the reason she got into graduate school at 42 why i help her with her homework before i do my own. it’s why the bottom of her computer burns my lap with each oxford comma and restructured sentence and fixed grammar rule. it’s why she doesn’t end up crying when i whisper that everything will be ok. my mama’s English is the reason i can tell her in two ways that she is my everything, mi todo because her love knows no language.

1 Types of Latin American music and dance 2 A non-Hispanic female, usually of North American origin 3 A wrestler 4 One, two, three 5 Happy Birthday 6 In Spanish

the Andes speak of death and 2020 – told in two hemispheres

i. April 2020, southern hemisphere

the Andes seem awfully quiet these days. Cotopaxi1 no longer writhes magma now that the streets have become volcanic. my mother sends condolences to people in Guayaquil 2 who would be lucky to have their bodies turned to ash, whose families no longer buy urns now that their sidewalks have become gravestones. the morgues in Ecuador have become so overwhelmed that families wait days before authorities can pick up the corpses on their driveways. they leave their loved ones slung like coats over wheelchairs to die at hospital doors, pack them into cardboard coffins to bury in their backyards and wrap their bodies in plastic tarp for their skin to bubble and swell under the heat like pan de dulce. 3

ii. July 2014, southern hemisphere

you could still hear an Andean whisper from my grandfather’s beach home in Salinas. 4 i had never seen mountains before, let alone spoken to them, but they told me of the traditions of the highlands and the coast, made me promise not to tell the beaches. i didn’t know my grandfather that well but i knew he heard them too, understood their Quichua 5 imprinted in his palms that picked husks from durian trees. his voice rung baritone anytime he talked back. when my grandfather died, the mountains hushed to a lull. i wish they had told me how to deal with a grieving mother, and the guilt of not grieving with her. the only memories of my grandfather i can recall are of the last time i saw him, in Salinas, as if I had met him for the very first time, as if the photos of when he was strong enough to visit us in America and hold me meant nothing. i could tell you of the soccer ball i kicked over his electric fence, the 50-degree saltwater i could barely swim in, the cold shower i took after my brothers buried me in the shore, how the sand washed off the grooves between my goosebumps to reveal shivers and sunburns, how the last thing i remember telling my grandfather, when he asked me if i wanted cafe con leche, 6 was no, how i ignored his somber eyes and sagging face. is it to late for me to say that i loved him to death.

iii. April 2020, northern hemisphere

i’m only reminded of the mountains vaguely and in passing, in newspaper headlines of Ecuador as the south’s epicenter and from pictures of unclaimed bodies stacked in mass graves and mounds. i can’t tell if the photos are from Guayaquil or New York’s Hart Island anymore. peaks and troughs don’t mean what they used to, not since i’ve stared at death charts so long that i forget that they’re people, hundreds of thousands of people whose names mean nothing behind numbers, whose families’ grief was reduced to a statistic. i wonder how many people died alone with no one to remember their name. i no longer wonder why mountains tend to form in ranges and not isolated summits.

iv. present day, northern hemisphere

today, as i wear my mask, i am reminded of Quito, of being 9,000 ft above sea level on Andean foothills where the air was so thin and the sun so close i could barely catch my breath, of the vertigo from climbing hills so high i got nosebleeds. i want to be there, standing on the equator with both feet in each hemisphere again, feeling on top of the world, blissful in ignorance and too young to know of anything but life, but now the Andes only speak of death and 2020, and for the first time, i grieve.

1 An active volcano in the Andes in Ecuador 2 The largest city in Ecuador 3 Sweet bread 4 A coastal town in Ecuador 5 An indigenous language spoken in Ecuador 6 Coffee with milk 7 The capital of Ecuador