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Mangos y limones

Mangos y limones

Pat Mora

This is a story about transformations, about swellings
and slick slidings, about bodies that grow
and others that slide out wet, like mangos, gold
flesh fermenting in salt water, about a woman biting
into the salty juice alive on her tongue, filling her
mouth, piece after piece until, in her friend's small kitchen,
she finished the entire glass jar, smiling and chewing
in silence, her friend's mouth and eyes open as wells.

This is a story about daughters and what they know
of the dark, about her youngest who felt the unseen,
knew at fifteen what the woman herself did not know,
her body, casual in its bleedings, relying on nausea,
reliable as any pregnancy test, but this time no curdling
when she ate tortillas and white cheese warmed in the sun.
Ay los hombre,” she concludes, “they're different
even before a speck of them is visible."

This is a story about lemons, twenty-five she bought
at the mercado, tart yellow moons she dug into salt
in her palm, chewing lemon after lemon on the bus home,
lips hungry and open, unlike that youngest daughter whose lips
shut for months, whose eyes grew smaller and smaller
as the mother's body expanded, the girl who ran into the dark
room at the first cry, pressed the newborn, slick as peeled
fruit, to her breast and said to him, “You were killing me,"
who after chasms of silence brought her mother a cup of hot
chocolate sighing, “Marni, I suffered. Es mio"

The mother thinks of them back in El Salvador,
when she slices limones or peels mangos. Yellow
scents pucker her memory, awaken her mouth then
and its cravings, the aching for fruit and hunger
for grains of sweet salt. Her body thicker now,
she slides a slice of mango between her lips,
laughs about once eating twenty-five frosted lemons,
her mouth full of her own stories.

Prairie Schooner, Vol. 68, No. 4 (Winter 1994), p. 80

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Pat Mora, a literacy advocate, writes for adults, teens, and children. Her poetry collections include Chants, Borders, Communion, Agua Santa: Holy Water, Aunt Carmen’s Book of Practical Saints, and Adobe Odes; she has also published three nonfiction books. She is an honorary member of the American Library Association and was a recipient and judge of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Pat Mora