By Ina Cariño
my dead grandmother’s young
Japanese maple was uprooted stolen
last week scattered leaves crushed
under a stranger’s foot. to recover
from this loss I spelled my name red
in alphabet soup—mashed the letters
together until they resembled my face,
which is as my mother’s—skin of ginger
& violet tuber. on split lips I wear my papa’s
name passed down from his father’s
fathers—a century of men called darling,
cariño by Spanish priests. I am still named
after all of them, here where my brown
face is my first language, where I carry
a muddled tongue. words I try to forget:
darling, cariño, native, empire, earth. in 1909
the Supreme Court gifted my forefathers
their native title for being dark on their own
dirt. to (dis)prove myself native I honey
my mouth with prayers for untainted soil,
because I was schooled across the ocean
in a convent—nuns cracking on my knuckles
with splintered rulers & taking five centavos,
my rusted allowance, for every word not
spoken in English. a trickery this germination
of my nonexistent accent. & I place blushed
begonias newly-potted on my windowsill—
sad replica of my childhood garden. still, I wept
when my grandmother’s tree returned—
replanted messy by surreptitious hands.
I tally my fortunes count new freckles
blossoming every year—stare at the mirror
until I am my mother’s mothers, even if
I can never tell which empire I mimic
as I am shuffled from one to the other.
Source: Poetry (September 2021)
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