Working Words

My sisters tell me spite is the greatest motivator | They say you do not work a day in your life if you do what you love | My father has toiled at the same restaurant for over forty years | They say que donde hay amor, hay dolor | We do not talk to our neighbors but we sometimes look at them from behind our barred windows | My mother does not gossip but she does tell stories | I know what my father does on long nights and that my mother will not do a thing regardless | They say there is no bad that can last one-thousand years, nor a body that can endure it | I tell my mother I cannot write my poetry in Spanish because each syllable counts and I am too full of sound | We do not share our personal lives in my family because we have a talent for taking others’ pain and making it a weapon | In reality I find the Spanish poem to be something sacred that I mustn’t taint | You put an accent mark over all esdrujula words, the kind that leave you breathless | My favorite part of translating is the difference between the figurative in each tongue | I speak in malaphors no one looks at the footnotes to understand | My motherlearned an entire new language, an entire new career, and how to drive herself at the tender age of forty-four | when people gossip about my family I wonder what they say | I like to split my family into music genres to make them easier to name | I hope they mention the lemon trees, the chickens, the way we found our way into our arts | My mother says she can’t draw a stick figure but my sisters all love to draw, my brother hashes out his cross hatching in Ball-Point Pen on the margins of his school notes | We do not gossip about our neighbors but we do curse them  from behind the door when they take up all the parking | I’ve heard  what they have said before: brujas, assholes, ne’er do wells, and my mother says, every time: dejarse llevar por rumores y chismes es de gente ignorante | allowing yourself to be swayed by rumors  and gossip is ignorant | You add or remove syllables depending on what word you end a line  on in Spanish poetry | When spite will only take you so far, I say, loving is hard work, too |