Hola, abuela.

Gracias. De nada.

Te amo. I love you.

Te amo, love,

Te amo,
rubia,
bonita.
Linda, Me-linda.
nombre.






bisabuela,



abuela.

Como estas,
bisabuela?
mi nombre es Melinda

yo sé eso-







Julieta.








Lope de Vega y
Don Quixote





vosotros

¿Qué onda, güey?
¡Órale!





mijas

Rosita y
Rosie Fuentes



¡Es Pérez!








aqua






Alt 0-2-3-3


espacio
intro







biografía




llámalos sueños.

Linda
Te amo, nombre

When great grandma visits from México
grandpa becomes translator
and I practice foreign, homeland words on my lips:

Easy, simple.

Even my gringo dad’s got it down.

A conversation of phrases.

we exchange back and forth, between hugs and gestures.

when she strokes my hair with her long brown fingers,
she tells me,
”She loves your blonde hair,” grandpa informs me.
Pretty, pretty,


As a tween, I read a Spanish-English book.
Practice phrases on the car ride over;
this will be grandma’s last visit.
I correct my mom,
that I should instead say

great-grand mom, but mom frowns,
tells me she’s never heard that word,
to keep it simple and just call her



She smiles,

and she laughs

I take Spanish class in high school,
re-learn my alphabet in sing-song and claps.
Get red-marked for accents going wrong ways,
on my family’s last name that I don’t have,
so I pick out a traditional first name instead,
don’t call me Melinda, call me


Grandma dies in a country I’ve never set foot in.
No passport, no funeral.
I get a scanned copy of her obituary.
I can’t read all the words.

In college I get my minor in Spanish.
I talk to my professors about

and my weekend plans.
I learn to conjugate the way they do in Spain.
The proper way. “Castilian,” says grandpa.
He refuses to call it Spanish.
It’s proper but there’s no

at the local grocery store,
only fast slang


Huh?
so they switch to English instead;
it relieves us both.

I watch cartoons with my kids, my

where bilingual characters with floral names,

teach toddlers to be well-rounded, marketable humans.

When I visit grandpa in the hospital
the host at check-in corrects my pronunciation of my family name

I don’t tell him we don’t usually put an accent
over our E and sometimes we just wing it
and put it on the second one.

I ask my grandpa to help me translate,
to explain how aguas means “look out”
but he doesn’t remember.
He fades in this hospital bed,
“Water, it means water.”
“You’ll get it one day. Don’t give up princess.”
he’ll reassure me as he nods into sleep.

I write a poem in Spanish,
online translator in the background,
searching for the right codes

For tildas and accent marks,
I put my keyboard into International mode


watch the red squiggles underline each word,
get saved by auto-correct.
I edit a poem in Spanglish,
translation broken between sighs.

Call me by my pen name,
by my 150 words about me

150 memorized words about my weekend
and men chasing windmills
and other delusions of grandeur-

Call me
pretty, pretty,

because it’s close enough.