Lapsus Calami

{with interludes from the land} 

1. Someone asks me which I like better: here or there. As always, I skirt around the words, so (un)sure of my identity that I have the luxury of pretending it doesn’t matter. I do love this city—all white limestone, & lavender, & the surety of knowing that everywhere I step, I am stepping into another’s footprints. Someone who spoke the language my grandparents spoke.

2. When you choose where to begin a story, you shape it.

3. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, an expat is someone who does not live in their own country. I don’t know what to make of this definition. Where is the line drawn? Where are the borders? What makes a country someone’s own?

4. When my grandmother was in fifth grade, they wouldn’t let her be in the Maypole dance. My legs were too dark, she tells me.

5. Four figures, attempting stillness. The light across one’s face until she is the sky. Over the place vision beats, sprigs of something that used to be alive (& in one plane of perception still is). I am related to them, though I don’t know how. My great-grandfather is not here to reveal the roots.

6. Blood sang of land before the settlers.

{Language is grown from me. My expanse.}

7. I only marvel at the sun when it’s at the intersection of mountain haze & sky. I can only bring myself to meet the light when it is almost disappeared.

8. She drove from Texas to California before she graduated high school for what she thought was a summer trip to see family. She labored in the fields. Tell me more, I say. What is there to tell, mija? It was hard. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. It’s hard work. But we needed the money. We were kind of in a bind.

9. There are two sounds in Arabic for the letter s: س & ص. To the English-attuned ear, perhaps, there is no difference between سبر &  صبر. One is patience. The other: to fathom, to explore, to probe a wound. Which asks for more from your throat?

10. See also: سدر & صدر. The chest, the location of that which beats. & a lote tree.

11. A dollar a bucket. Cherries, she says. I could have gone to pick apricots. I tried to get on, but I was too short. They liked tall girls. I don’t know if she saw the trees in flower or only when she was asked to strip them of the color that remains.

12. Every stone fruit knows how to stop a blade.

13. A migrant is a person who travels to a different country or place, often in order to find work. The Cambridge Dictionary’s related words: asylum-seeker, anti-immigration. See also: immigrant.

{Your footsteps are unsure.}

14. The noun for original is (almost) the verb for prayer. Not in this language. In the one that lilts from beyond yesterday.

15. She graduated valedictorian. That’s where I got to be so competitive—because I knew that’s the one way they could not deny how much a person accomplishes.

16. Is something being offered if it’s not being seen? Arena del desierto. Cielo del desierto. Desert sand & sky.

17. My grandmother meets my grandfather picking cherries. My grandmother meets my grandfather amidst the cherry trees. One of these stories is caught in the filter American Dream, all hazy light. It is not the second one.

18. Flight is another way of saying sacrifice.

{You think I am not in your blood, but what else do you call the dust inhaled as you went from clot to breath? Named in my name.}

19. Of all the Spanish words for homelands, I like mis tierras most. My soils. The sites of roots. Cerezos. تين و زيتون, figs & olives. Flores de cempasúchil & cherry trees.

20. Almost 60 years later, she tells me, & he’s lived up to all I wanted. I’m blessed.

21. I take her words from before & string them together after. His is the only grave beneath a tree for several rows. God loves the field workers (I tell myself). For all their labor under the beating sun, for all they plucked of themselves from the growth, they are granted shade. If not in this world, then the next.

{He tended me for a lifetime. I will embrace him for an eternity.} 

22. The wind has a way of forcing me back into an adult body (or the semblance of one). All near possibility.

23. Oh, my homeland. Oh, my homelands.

24. I could leave footprints in the dirt if I wanted to, a feather for the wind to carry past the telephone wires, the flickering streetlight, the empty spaces waiting for poppies to complete them. But then, this is just another iteration. I can scroll for as long as I remember to press finger to glass.

25. 1845: Texas becomes a part of the United States of America. My ancestors become “American” without crossing a single border—staying within the same four walls.

26. Tell me a story that is not about the land.

27. There were times they would warn us not to speak Spanish. Then, we would think twice. They couldn't check us, though. We spoke Spanish, we still did it, we still, I mean, they can’t. She trails off.

28. Violence can force something, always, into the present tense.

29. An immigrant is a person who has come to a different country in order to live there. The sample sentence the Cambridge Dictionary offers begins: illegal.

30. Why aren’t there more words for language in English? Give me mountains, stripped into a new ashland. A tangle of metal. A smear of fog & gold.

31. مغترب is one way of approximating migrant.

32. مهاجر is another.

33. I ask someone for the difference. Both refer to someone who has left his country. The only difference is whether one chooses to leave or is forced onto that path. The first forsakes, the second is forsaken.

34. Words are just another way of piercing actuality. Truth: A construction we language our way into.

{You are so scared of laying claim to me that you push me away. You claim that which does not claim you.}

35. When I was younger, my grandparents owned a laundromat. I loved the whir of clothes being scrubbed of grime & becoming new. I still do. & the smell. I sometimes bury my face in dryer-warm sheets & tell myself that this comfort is inheritance.

36. Notice I have not talked about how to say immigrant in Spanish.

37. Once, we visit, & there is a red, red moon.

38. If you’re there at the right season, the trees in the driveway are coated in tiny white flowers. They draw the eye. The chained fences blur into silver. The stray dog in the street is no longer being kept out. It is also not being let in.

39. Someone tells me that in Spanish, land in sight is tierra a la vista. I see the conquistadores.

40. Landfall. An arrival or a collapse.

{Watch yourself spin away from belonging.}

41. The language I place in the mouths of my ancestors is one brought by colonizers.

42. There exists in this world a single word for letting the sun in. An entire horizon to tuck away behind the tongue.

43. 1970: Asphalt faded to brown by the era. A sky so pale it is truer to label it white. Enough windows to lead into a few dozen lives. Fewer doors. Three sisters, & beyond them, a shadow that is the promise of the fourth & fifth yet to come. Zoom in, & it is just the brown of the father’s sleeve. I cannot place the face I will know in this man now, his brown suit, his shadow pooling with his daughters’. (The body is always tugging against separation.) Past them, her long, dark hair & nothing more.

44. Tell me a history that is not about the land.

45. What I have been trying to say:

46. Everywhere cannot escape the echoing blue.

47. مغترب shares a root with غربة, which is not easily translated. Estrangement, alienation, desolation. No. More a void than a word.

48. In the little laundromat I no longer have any claim to, my grandfather used to hand my sister & me countless quarters, emptying the brown paper rolls of a day’s earnings to see us smile. We slotted them in every gumball machine (filled with anything but gumballs), chasing the permanent: the prettiest bouncy ball (clear with gold glitter), plastic rings to adorn our fingers. My mother protested. Then, I didn’t know why.

49. He snuck us ice cream sandwiches before dinner, laughing, only letting her see when all that was left were traces of chocolate on our faces. I remember his hands, gnarled, life story emblazoned. His white beard. His laugh. (Or the reflection of it.) Tell me why only the memory of sweet cream lingers.

50. مهاجر shares a root with هجرة. When I hear the word, my first thought is of the final Messenger, who, when driven out of his homeland, said, By God, you are the best & most beloved land to God. Had I not been driven away from you, I would not have left you.

51. In a language not this one, to park & to drive are housed within the same word. Here I am, hurtling down the gravel. See instead: Here I am.

{You who call yourself a writer, wordless. How to build bridges to guide you back?}

52. There is a lote tree at the edges of the seventh heaven. Some say it is covered with angels; none have gone beyond it but the Beloved.

53. Light will flower its way up the side of any empty wall. An old man paces in lavender around his small front yard, hands in pockets, the past in his eyes.

54. I’m not sure if I meant to write my past instead.

55. Here I am, abandoning the city. The moon slips into itself. At some point, doesn’t everyone wish to be a tree?

56. إن الذي فرض عليك القرآن لرادك إلى معاد. Read: There is a way to ask for return.

57. Pictures of pictures. Pictures of stone.