Growing Up and Sexual Violence Theme Analysis

To be from this barrio is to be made of this earth & clay:

dirt-packed, water-backed, third-world smacked:
they say, the soil beneath a country’s nail, they say.
I love my home. But it might be a sinkhole

trying to feast quicksand

mouth pried open; I hunger for stable ground,

somewhere else.

[…] Before I learned to fear him,
there was one memory that kept coming back,
the one I cannot shake even as I shake when he approaches:

Cero has never appeared young to me. Always this same
age, this same face. But he would come to school
to pick Emily up. & she would stop

everything she was doing & run to him, arms spread wide.
He would catch her, swinging her in circles. & I was jealous.
Jealous I didn’t have a consistent male figure like Cero in my
life.

But before we got off at our stop,

Papi turned to my nine-year-old self & said:
“Never, ever, let them see you sweat, negra.

Fight until you can’t breathe, & if you have to forfeit,
you forfeit smiling, make them think you let them win.”

Did I love chess?
I did chess.

But love? Like I
love watching beauty tutorials?

[…]

Or how I love Papi’s brother, Tío Jorge,
holding my hand and saying I make him proud

for myself not for what I win?

Like I loved my father, that kind of love?
Consuming, huge, a love that takes the wheel,

a love where I pretended to be something I wasn’t?
I did chess. I was obsessed with winning.

But never love.

Even when he came to visit
this house he paid for & updated,
Papi treated Tía like an older sister:

so much respect for how she kept the house,
for the beliefs she had,
the decisions she made regarding my well-being.

They were friends. But until this moment
I have not thought of what she’s lost.
He was like her brother. Besides me, her only family.

If you are not from an island,
you cannot understand
what it means to be of water:

to learn to curve around the bend,
to learn to rise with rain,
to learn to quench an outside thirst

while all the while
you grow shallow
until there is not one drop

left for you.

I know this is what Tía does not say.

Sand & soil & sinew & smiles:
all bartered. & who reaps? Who eats?

Not us. Not me.

Mami still had an air around Papi,
like he was a medicine she knew she needed

even as she cringed at the taste.

But now I wonder
if it was always more than that.

Maybe Mami knew about the other woman?
Even without seeing the certificate.

I think of how the word unhappy houses
so many unanswered questions.

Tía Lidia puts her hand over mine. “Your mother is having
a tough time. Their marriage wasn’t easy, & she has so much
she’s dealing with. Yano was a great father to you,

& I know you loved him, but he wasn’t always a great husband.”
& I don’t know how one man can be so many different things

to the people he was closest to. But I nod. I almost slip and ask
does everyone know? But if they don’t I can’t be the one

to reveal the dirt on my father’s name.

The squares do not overlap.
& neither do the pieces.

The only time two pieces
stand in the same square

is the second before one
is being taken & replaced.

& I know now, Papi could not
move between two families.

[…]

He would glide from family to family,
square to square & never look back.

[…]

Everything has a purpose, Papi taught me.

But what was his in keeping
such big secrets?

The ceremony we had for Papi in New York
is nothing compared to what is planned in DR.

Tía and Camino arrange an entire party.
Mami looks on disapprovingly

as a band of men in white show up with drums
& tambourines, & it’s a good thing the grave site

isn’t too far from the church because dozens
& dozens of people show up, until we’re a blur,

a smudge of people dressed like ash
advancing down the street.

I borrowed a light-colored dress from Camino,
& we walk down the street arm in arm.

People sing songs I don’t know.
I think Papi would have loved us making such a fuss.

[…] & here we are: Tía like a bishop,

slashing her long machete. Mami, the knight with rims. My body
in front of my sister’s body: queens.

Papi, who I know is here too. He did
build that castle he always promised.

She grabs her purse & drives out.
There was so much I had left to say:

That maybe a bad husband can still be a good parent.
That maybe he tried to be the best he knew how to be.

That he hurt her got caught up there’s no excuse.
But he is not here. He is not here. We are all that’s left.