Fiebre Tropical

Buenos días, mi reina. Immigrant criolla here reporting desde los Mayamis from our ant-infested townhouse.

With her emo ways Sylvia Plath was teaching me inglés, cachaco, teaching me that you can be brilliant and terribly alone

They pointed at your sadness to make theirs more secretive and therefore grander

Women in my family possessed a sixth sense, not necessarily from being mothers, but from the close policing of our sadness: your tristeza wasn’t yours, it was part of the larger collective Female Sadness jar to which we all contributed.

A pose passed down through the generations of Female Sadness stacked inside my bones, all the way back to Tata’s mother’s mother. A pose that says: I’m here suffering pero no no no I do not want your help; I want you to stand there and watch me suffer—witness what you have done—and let me suffer silently, with my discount glam.

Mami didn’t even understand ni pío of English and that threw her in the bottomest of the bottoms of the hierarchy.

The Eye: the ultimate authoritative wide-open flickering of lashes with an almost imperceptible tilt of the head that had us on our feet and running.

The surrounding swamp collaborated with Mami to make every single day excruciating

think-of-it-as-moving-up-the-social-ladder!

The heat is a stubborn bitch breathing its humid mouth on your every pore, reminding you this hell is inescapable, and in another language