Four Poems

You Have to Be Ready

          when they are—
my mother hands me
          dishes to wash—
even when you’re not.
          I watch her turn

the faucet on,
          my hands heat
under the water
          and I wonder
who told her

          she had to be open
twenty-four/seven.
          How many times
did she lie, split
          open, reviewing

a mental list of things
          to be done tomorrow?
Did she learn
          over the years:
where to kiss,

          when to touch,
how to suck to help
          her husband finish
quick—to end
          the chore. To make

more time to be
          the good wife, the one
who makes floorboards
          reflect the moon
when it comes

          through the window,
to make sure
          he doesn’t drift into
another woman’s body—
          to say yes.

When My Little Sister Mistakes Selena for Selena Gomez

I whip around so fast she gets whiplash. No sister
of mine will confuse Selena with Selena Gomez.
I say Se–len–a slow and enunciate the Spanish
because when you say Selena in Spanish every
Tejana knows you’re praying to the Queen of Tejano.
La Reina de Cumbia. Patron saint of red lipstick,
pizza, bombass bustiers, purple jumpsuits,
and washing machine hips. A name untouched
by the American tongue. She’s the patron saint
of Latinas everywhere: a light embossed into memory
that we can be something more in this borderland
of tongues. On this American soil so quick to tie
our names down to English—because don’t you know
Selena Gomez was named after Selena. America just
turned her name into something it could pronounce.

Portrait of a Daughter and her Mother on the Sidewalk

          after Ada Limón

Bare feet and a sunflower

dress, she stood

beside her mother

on the sidewalk, under

a tree at six years old.

Before her baby was born.

         she moved an ocean away.

         they became strangers.

         they stopped talking.

         the broken ceramic spoon.

         the divorce.

         she returned

from Mexico with no room

left to hold her mother’s pain.

Before the land between them

split and she grew brave

enough to save the child,

she once was, from the house

that belonged to her mother.

She never knew

how it would feel

to be mothered.

Porcelain Spoons

As a newly minted divorcée, my mother traveled to Europe with her friends and bounced from Barcelona to Rota to Morocco to Kraków and then to Auschwitz. She wanted to go places she claimed my dad never wanted to go. Along the way she picked up souvenirs for my partner and me—small things that we didn’t need but that she felt she needed to buy. Two sets of a porcelain tea-bag coaster with the silhouette of a cat and a matching porcelain spoon: Made in Poland. It had been a year since I distanced myself from her and found a therapist. I told her I needed space, but she still called. Still texted. Still became agitated when I didn’t pick up on the first ring. Still enraged when I didn’t respond altogether.

I unwrapped the spoons, and one of the heads fell to the floor. The porcelain spoon arrived broken at the neck. In our living room, I sat with a piece in each hand. The blue flowers with black centers glossed in the light. I pressed my thumb into the spoon’s mouth and sighed. My partner asked Do you want to throw it away? I shook my head. It held more beauty than its intact partner spoon. I couldn’t throw it out.

Instead, I found a small white shadow box, laid it inside, and closed it in. My mother was mothering with this spoon. This was hers: black, blue, white, flowered, and fractured. Would mine look like this? Would it be soft and split—at the neck? The pieces tapped against the glass.

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Amanda Galvan Huynh is a Chicana writer and educator from Texas. She is the author of Where My Umbilical is Buried, a chapbook Songs of Brujería, and Co-Editor of Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making: An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics.