Caleb Willett

that same spring i learned to refer is to forget daydreams, coriander

chickadee whistles cracking on barn-door echoes stir the air to snow

can i see the web? it’s only tangible through touch. widow or recluse?

fall came, sweet basil slowed down my nervous system first then not at all

whip-poor-will, like that! you say as i approximate the mourning dove’s mourn

leeches ring-road shale, water lily, putrescence sunfish sunbathe by

think you think like me? think you think you think like me? think you’ll wait and see?

Cristina Coppa

The Mother Whose Daughter Gave Birth to Me

Summer in Lima is the season of everyone jamming to their favorite tunes. High schoolers falling prey to aestival love gather at someone’s house and listen to Yahaira Plasencia’s romantic “Tú” while sunbathing on the terrace. Their younger siblings swing their uniform jackets and convulse to the electric beat in Tilsa Lozano’s “Soy Soltera.” The house next door is filled with nostalgic forty-something-year-olds returning from work to JAS’s “Ya No Quiero Más Ska” as they reminisce about their teenage shenanigans. This salsatropipop-ska amalgamation threatens normal decibel levels.

However, the ruckus that’s a product of this generational battle of the bands stays on one side of the park; on the other, a three story house buzzes with recuerdo music sung by a jovial old woman who has no consideration for noise pollution. A woman who is unaware of her shouting when intending to whisper. A woman whose voice upstages any other chanting at a birthday party. A woman who not only sings, but who dances. A woman who taught her granddaughter how to dance like a Peruvian. That woman temporarily lost her identity whenever she heard her favorite singer broadcasted on 88.9 FM.

Even though her name is Margarita, she imagines herself as the song’s recipient, “Fanny,” while her hips sway to the static-riddled melody of Leo Dan’s baritone blasting on Radio Felicidad. She beckons me to join her. My short legs surprisingly keep up with the broad moves as I try to adapt the few marinera lessons I had received to the hanky-less ballad invading the living room. The green flecks embedded in her hazel eyes shine against the chandelier’s warm light when she comes back from a twirl and lowers her gaze to my chubby, pureesmeared cheeks.

“Tú fuiste buena al pensar que yo a ti te amaba ya,” she croons and loops me under her arm.

“Estas son cosas que pasan y . . .” I carol and try not to trip on her Dr. Scholl’s sandals.

Again, she whirls while we finish with “. . . es el tiempo quien después dirá!” Seeing her in all her gyrating splendor, five-year-old me wonders why Mami Margarita had never been a singer, dancer, or artiste of some kind. However, I was wrong to assume my grandmother had never formally engaged in the performative arts.

Years after our summer impromptu frolics, she recounted her school days of acting, singing, and dancing in school plays. She remembered she was once casted into the role of a wise old granny who defended her family’s mischiefs and, in the process, invoked the audience’s laughter. Who would have known that she’d stay in character for the rest of her life?

For another production, she sang Pepe Miranda’s hit single about his revered muse which led to a clap-thundering audience, enamored schoolboys nicknaming her after the song’s title: “Cristina.” She became flustered by the attention and often hid behind her older siblings whenever a male classmate tried to talk to her after school.

She was also bewildered by not being called by her real name.

Until this day, I am still intrigued by our nominal connection since the sixties. She never knew why that song led to her school nickname; virtually all Peruvian ballads at the time featured a female moniker as its title, and she had interpreted plenty of those with the same devotion. Regardless of the lovestruck classmates’ rationale and her past confusion, it’s a beautiful reoccurrence. Before I was even a zygote, destiny had already determined that this woman, officially my grandmother, and I would share not only a nickname but maternal-filial love. Destiny had planned this for us as well.

The first person to hold me in their arms wasn’t my mother or my father. Tired from seventeen hours and twenty minutes of labor, my mother had momentarily passed out due to ongoing bronchitis, a

tardy doctor, and an induced amniotomy. My father was nervously pacing in the hospital’s waiting room. By default, after the nurses cleaned amniotic fluid and clotted blood from my newborn skin, they handed my blanket-wrapped body to the woman who had traveled 3678.517 miles to see me: my grandmother. That was the first time we met.

Upon cradling my skinny form, she took it to herself to fatten me up, which she did for the following six months. As my mother needed to recuperate from the bronchitis, my parents decided she and I were better off in Peru, where it was summer, for my first months of life. Therefore, it was my grandmother’s time to shine, as no one knew how to use limeño produce for its salubrious qualities better than she did. No one knew how to turn a six pound newborn into an eighteen pound baby in half a year better than she did. Banana puree. Isla banana puree. Pear puree. Apple puree. Squash puree. Spinach puree. Potato puree. Sweet potato puree. Nutritious concoctions that mixed most of the above purees became my diet. On Channel 4 of the Peruvian TV network, Mami Margarita followed the teachings of a nutrition expert called Teresa Ocampo and stayed up to date with the latest information on healthy foods. Even though neither my mother nor uncles had any health concerns, my grandmother always wanted to nourish her children with wholesome ingredients and fed them short of committing gluttony. Of course, she would do the same with me.

By the time I was starting to sit up by myself, I had to deal with the extra complications of a fat belly, stout extremities, and rosy cheeks reddening with exertion. My grandmother’s care stripped me from any chance of developing the coveted slim figure and resigned my baby body to reincarnating Siddhartha Gautama before he became Buddha. Despite her modifying my anatomy, I will never hold it against her because she introduced me to Isla banana puree.

After Mami Margarita left her performer days behind and married my grandfather, she became a successful entrepreneur, in part thanks to my grandfather’s connections and his position in the Policía Nacional de Investigaciones. During the eighties, she was a renowned pâ-

tissier in Lima and catered custom cakes to wide-scale affairs: civil weddings, ecclesiastical weddings, diamond weddings, silver weddings, ruby weddings, gold weddings, anniversaries, baptisms, birthdays, quiceañeras, concerts . . . Through one of these events, she met her adored idol: Leo Dan. They hugged and smiled for the camera as my grandfather took their photos. My grandmother never smiles for pictures and opts for a model’s expressionless countenance instead. I believe the only other instance in which she made an exception was a small sepia portrait depicting my grandparents after their two-week honeymoon. My grandfather’s slicked-back hair enhanced his youthful handsomeness, and his arms, toned from his routine training, held her. Mami Margarita’s cheeks easily flush due to her alabaster complexion, but she refused to let the smallest buff of blush transcribe as gypsum dust on photographic paper. At the ripe age of nineteen, she had mastered the classic red-carpet beam.

Years of strenuous labor brought by manually fashioning sweet creations made her quit the pâtisserie business and venture into another industry during the nineties with the help of her young adult children and her recently retired husband. They inaugurated “El Cat,” the second pub in Peru to provide patrons with complimentary video streaming on a cinematic screen, a novel experience for the country in that decade. As soon as you set foot onto the waxy red floor, a bouncer quickly scanned you and let you into the main room. You

were then promptly greeted by a smiling waiter—my aunt if they were short on staff—eager to take your order while you settled the velvet chair in the best angle to watch music videos on the giant screen. You probably also saw my uncle to the side managing the song requests from other clients. Hidden from the mystifying ambiance of the video pub, my mother would prepare your pisco sour or sangria. After finishing your drink and tiring your eyes from the projecting images on the giant screen, you stood from your seat and made your way to the cash register at the far end of the establishment. Taking out your leather wallet from your back pocket, you would approach the cashier to pay your tab until you were met with glimmering hazel eyes. “That will be S/25, please.”

While handing her a check or a bill and a silver-gold coin, you would stare at her irises, as her eye color is a rare sight among the Peruvian population. However, if you stared too much, she would signal my grandfather to come out. With a menacing glare, he would place himself beside Mami Margarita and palm the lump of his revolver in his front pocket. You would quickly avert your sight and leave before you incurred the wrath of the ex-commander.

On your way out, you would pass by a neon sign with the “El Cat” logo: a sleek silhouette of a black cat that served as a backdrop for its green eyes. Sometimes, you would hear clients’ murmurings that the feline’s eye color was similar to hers.

Sometimes, they asked the waiter if this was true. Sometimes, you would hear that they called Mami Margarita by another nickname behind her back: “la gata.”

Birds, butterflies, and cats roam across the adjoining gardens of the residential lane. This last creature’s weight tends to bend the bamboo-like branches of my grandmother’s cane begonias, so whenever she sees one of these strays climbing down the bougainvillea roofs in her garden, she quietly shoos them away. On the other hand, if a passing dog even begins to lift a hind leg, she takes advantage of its sensitive hearing and optimizes the potency of her voice through a vociferous chant: “¡Anda animal feroz que primero es Dios antes que vos!”

As the canid scurries away, she goes back to watering her bird of paradise flowers with small flicks of her wrist. The soil is now perfectly moist and won’t drown the orange-blue blossoms.

It really is no wonder that my grandmother loves gardening. After all, Margarita means daisy in English. What I do wonder about is the salience of nomenclature in a person’s life. Is it mere coincidence that Mami Margarita loves flowers because she was as precious as one in her parents’ eyes? Or has her name unconsciously driven her to taking a liking to them? Or, what’s more, does her appellative have no relation to her affinity with plants?

The world may also never know why my daisies died. While my grandmother visited me and my family when I was eight years old, I bought a pot of daisies. The buds were already blooming by the time we returned from the store, and I was so excited to follow in Mami Margarita’s horticultural steps. She told me how to take care of the plant and trusted I would follow her instructions. I dutifully watered the flowers until I returned from school one day to find burned petals, withered stems, and arid soil. I didn’t know the sun could be so jealous of a daisy’s angelic aureole. Never again will I let a plant die on my watch. I’ve recently adopted a potted succulent. Mami Margarita has encouraged me to raise it with love even though it doesn’t need me much. I just hope the plant thinks of me as I think of her: as a mother.

Still, I am partially ashamed for not having the wisdom to take in more sought after plants like Mami Margarita. However, I realize that I am at a disadvantage compared to her upbringing around flora. Even though I have always lived across the street from a park, the most contact I had with plant life growing up was running on cut grass and climbing pine trees. On the other hand, my grandmother spent most of her childhood days frolicking in the vegetation of her parents’ country estate. Surrounded by acres and acres of greenery, she played hide-and-seek with her brothers and sisters among the corn fields and coffee harvests. While playing tag, she had the luxury of picking oranges and sweet lemons from low-hanging branches without slowing down her chasing.

Another game, the one she liked the most, was a highly competitive scavenger hunt. The first one to find a bird’s nest among the hundreds of trees and thousands of shrubs on their property would be the winner. She does not remember any more if she had ever won, but she does remember climbing a fruit tree and observing tiny, featherless birds chirping for their mother’s return. In silent admiration, she sat with them for the rest of the day. Perhaps, she ruminated on what it meant to be a mother, or how to mother her future children. Maybe, she resolved to become the best mother ever.

All I know is that whatever thought she chased in her puerile mind turned her into a great mother. A grand mother.

Tiffany Leong

Memento Mori, Mother

I knew the acridness of acetone before I knew the scent of her skin,

Ma, I called her Ma . . . The nights which my troublemaker kid-body imprinted the cracked-leather couch, waiting, I waited, for the sound of Mother. Hours dug into the cushion, drowned out by a TV tuned to a pixellated pipe dream. Ma came in midnight, bent-backed, cracked soles chemical-fumed, sandpit eyes, hollowed soul . . . Not a word, not a single word from her worn mouth. A hand threaded through my thin strands and warmth touched my forehead off-screen, where Ma’s chipped nail polish carried the emptiest gleam. The day I turned thirteen I was product of sweaty palms, Justice lip gloss, pimpled summers. A heat coiled in the pit of my hairy stomach.

The day I turned thirteen Ma told me I was too dark, Only boys could be dark. When I bled for the first time she tore my jeans apart, stinging sweatclang of a sink slick with ink— this sting, this sting— how much farther could I play the part? Emerging sea-beast, a girl’s hide— how was I supposed to know the female phoenix

meant panties drenched in peroxide? She held me, she fed me; the only scent I knew of her: bleach on my arms and the boiling pot, clearance-sale lotion and my baby brother’s snot. The day I turned thirteen I thought I was a woman, how Ma wished I was a woman.

To spend your last years among rusted vents and pity flowers and my fingers smoothing the crinkles of your gown. Dated magazines, peeled mandarins, red pills on trays. When I leave the hospital it is dark, and my flesh purpled, so it must be me, the one who decays. You were right, Ma, I’m rotten work— A corpse was born on my wedding day; it was buried under my veil. You were right—about men and my strife; I couldn’t handle that I still have dreams about your kitchen knife. Sliced apple froths in my palm, the scent of an end which impregnates aches lingers. We who slip into sterilized silence. Ma, our hands never touch, they retract at the skim, So I think they never will Ma, I get so sick of you sometimes, I feel sick around you, So I hold my breath, so you hold my breath . . .