The Poet X

by Elizabeth Acevedo

“Oíste?” she asks, but walks away before I can answer. Sometimes I want to tell her, the only person in this house who isn’t heard is me.

Real

Pero, tú no eres fácil is a phrase I’ve heard my whole life. When I come home with my knuckles scraped up: Pero, tú no eres fácil. When I don’t wash the dishes quickly enough, or when I forget to scrub the tub: Pero, tú no eres fácil. Sometimes it’s a good thing, when I do well on an exam or the rare time I get an award: Pero, tú no eres fácil. When my mother’s pregnancy was difficult, and it was all because of me, because I was turned around and they thought that I would die or worse, that I would kill her, so they held a prayer circle at church and even Father Sean showed up at the emergency room, Father Sean, who held my mother’s hand as she labored me into the world, and Papi paced behind the doctor, who said this was the most difficult birth she’d been a part of but instead of dying I came out wailing, waving my tiny fists, and the first thing Papi said, the first words I ever heard, “Pero, tú no eres fácil.” You sure ain’t an easy one.

:0

your mother has sight for nothing but you two and God; your father seems to be serving a penance, an oath of solitary silence. Their gazes and words are heavy with all the things they want you to be.

What if I like a boy too much and he breaks my heart, and I wind up angry and bitter like Mami, walking around always exclaiming how men ain’t shit, even when my father and brother are in the same room? What if I like a boy too much and none of those things happen . . . they’re the only scales I have. How does a girl like me figure out the weight of what it means to love a boy?

Shittt

what’s the point of God giving me life if I can’t live it as my own? Why does listening to his commandments mean I need to shut down my own voice?

When I’m told girls Shouldn’t. Shouldn’t. Shouldn’t. When I’m told To wait. To stop. To obey. When I’m told not to be like Delilah. Lot’s Wife. Eve. When the only girl I’m supposed to be was an impregnated virgin who was probably scared shitless. When I’m told fear and fire are all this life will hold for me. When I look around the church and none of the depictions of angels or Jesus or Mary, not one of the disciples look like me: morenita and big and angry.

On Papi You can have a father who lives with you. Who every day eats at the table and watches TV in the living room and snores through the whole night and grunts about the bills, or the weather, or your brother’s straight As. You can have a father who works for Transit Authority, and reads El Listín Diario, and calls back to the island every couple of months to speak to Primo So-and-So. You can have a father who, if people asked, you had to say lived with you. You have to say is around. But even as he brushes by you on the way to the bathroom he could be gone as anybody. Just because your father’s present doesn’t mean he isn’t absent.

STOP IM GONNA CRY

Maybe, the only thing that has to make sense about being somebody’s friend is that you help them be their best self on any given day. That you give them a home when they don’t want to be in their own.

He’s Mami’s miracle. He would become her sin. I guess I hoped. If I didn’t ever really know. It would be like he wasn’t. But maybe my silence. Just made him feel more alone. Maybe my silence. Condones the ugly things people think.

When I was little Mami was my hero. Because she barely spoke English and wasn’t born here, but she didn’t let that stop her from defending herself if she got cut in line at the grocery store, or from fighting to get Twin into a genius school. Because I’ve never seen her ask my father for money or complain about her job. Because her hands will be scraped raw from work but she still folds them to pray. When I was little Mami was my hero. But then I grew breasts and although she was always extra hard on me, her attention became something else, like she wanted to turn me into the nun she could never be.

And I think about all the things we could be if we were never told our bodies were not built for them.

She would smile and say I was her premio for hard work, I was her premio for patience. And I loved being her reward. The golden trophy of her life. I just don’t know when I got too big for the appointed pedestal.