spanglish

A Poem by Miss Coral

I am vapour thin and porous,
a fishnet of ideals, of literature
washed up on a foreign shore and I collect
the wet pages with hands as wrinkled
as the salty sentences and I will learn
Spanish this summer;
they call me bonita in the markets and I
watch where I keep my money;

there are fishmarkets in the morning and fruit markets
in the afternoons, bonitas and swift hands and swifter mouths
and then slow, gaping mouths of mackerel,
choked on oxygen and the deep songs of los pescadores
as they heave up their catch--

they, the fisherman, are like great collectors with
their hooks and tools, pull in glittering scales like coins
with their corded arms and hungry families at home who chirp like
little birds. I can smell lumpy lemons and oranges that taste like Saturn
and Jupiter and sometimes even the sun, and we sprinkle citrus on our fish and
they taste like mercury and a gasp of gills--

I went and watched los pescadores
tie and knot and cast their nets as the tide curled around their
fists and the fish writhed like an obscene god of the sea
and slipped loose of their noose,
slipped and swam with their spiralled fins and small glass teeth--
and the boats came into the harbor like
long lost prisoners. the men were tired stewards
with early morning sweat on their tanned brows.

I sleep with the lull of tide under a heavy harbor
and dig words up from the sand like shells
and fossils and the spider carcass of a sandcastle buried by the tide--
they are spanglish and broken into marketplace bonitas and
the rolled r in pescadores and the mesa of a looong, flat "a",
something that I can pronounce.

I am sitting in the tidepools with my quiet sounds
and sewing fishnets for selling--
I am taken by the tide and dissolving in the texture
of a starfish, an estrella de mar,
into the crag of a cliffside, jagged and bleak in the dusk.
reedy fingers wound round string,
I pull and thread and knot and pinch words together in
a tight tongue; each morning, los pescadores greet me with a smile.