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Remembering

Published onDec 09, 2024
Remembering
·

Remembering

            I

I remember it was you 
who read aloud to me 
and taught me how to see and 
feel the words. 
And you who sang to me 
in your subtle, aching voice 
about the lonely queen 
and her three soft daughters. 
And it was you 
who showed me how 
to believe in quiet fairies and 
talking stars and 
even Santa Claus. 
I even learned to smile
from you. 
I learned that brittle, lonely smile 
from you.

            II

And I remember you, 
you smiled through everything­–
the tears and anger and 
the miles 
of nothing 
but dry, Oklahoma prairie grass. 
You smiled 
through leaving the soil that 
you for three decades 
called home. 
You smiled 
through leaving
your life behind 
in the greyness 
of the Andes. 
But I remember 
the sighs too and 
the way 
you used to whisper 
mi pais querido 
into the night air. 
I remember Mother 
I remember.

Volume 22, no. 2, 1994

M. Soledad Caballero is a Professor of English and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Allegheny College. She is a Macondo and CantoMundo fellow, winner of Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts’ 2019 Joy Harjo poetry prize and the 2020 SWWIM’s SWWIM-For-the-Fun-of-It contest. Her poems have appeared in the Missouri Review, the Iron Horse Literary Review, Ninth Letter, and other venues. Her essays have been published in The Hopkins Review, Cagibi, and elsewhere. I Was a Bell (2021) won Red Hen Press’s 2019 Benjamin Saltman poetry prize, was the 2022 International Association of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry book of the year, and was a 2022 International Latino Book Award winner. Her second collection, Flight Plan, will be published by Red Hen Press in 2025. She is an avid TV watcher and a terrible birder.

 

 

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