Letters From a Poet to Her Mother Tongue on Not Calling Home

Michelle Garcia Fresco

Mama

I don't dream about you anymore

I imagine I once did before the world could

hold me still I am my mother’s daughter

still let lineage line my stomach still

even when your arms weren’t always

trying to remember your voice Mama

I am afraid of you not understanding

who I have become, unable to cut colonizer

from consonant never able to speak

in home Mama my syllables are banana leaves

hanging

among all of the bodies that will never speak

in home again Abuelas ghost finds her way

over on Thanksgiving, brings with her

everything she could afford to carry

or could not afford to leave Mama I keep trying

to find you in the melanin you left

behind I just find myself forever

being sweet enough to be swallowed

or to want to be consumed somedays

I can't afford this body of water

that has become womanhood

don't know where we begin

after we forget how we left off

or who it was that we left behind

you never taught me how to call

only to know resurrection as calling

to know this skin as home

Michelle Garcia Fresco is an Afro-Latinx poet and Spoken Word artist from Lynn, Massachusetts. She is currently a junior at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, double majoring in Creative Writing and Sociology. She believes in the power of poetry as a medium for social justice. Garcia’s writing is often inspired by the women in her family, social and racial injustices in America, coping with loss and mental health, and her Dominican roots.