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The first time Mamá reads Blanca Varela to him, Derek is left speechless. What is the purpose of poetry? What does it mean to create? Mamá, with her henna dyed hair, with her Spanish-tinged singing voice, with her long fingers that know how to braid, laughs kindly at his reaction. He’s maybe nine or ten years old, freshly diagnosed with anxiety. Mami warned her not to give him anything that might make things worse, but somehow Mamá knows that the surrealism can calm him down.
They’re on vacation in Consuelo. Papi was invited, but he had a five-day conference smack in the middle of their time in the Dominican Republic. He seemed sadder about it than Derek had, but Mami kissed Papi’s face and promised to drag him along on the next family vacation.
Consuelo is beautiful in the way that children love. Mamá smooths her hand over his head and asks Mami when she’s going to let him wear braids, Mami rolling her eyes while her brothers hoot and agree. Abua tsks and touches his scalp gently, tells him he has good hair. Mami doesn’t say anything to her mother but she reminds Mamá that last time they tried getting his hair braided he got bored halfway through and made them take it out two days later. At night, she tells him there’s no such thing as good hair, and Mamá touches her shoulder in apology.
Consuelo is not Samwell, Derek thinks. In Consuelo Derek had caught the chicken-pox and Mamá had to stay away from him for a little while, because she’s never had it and Mami didn’t want her to get sick, too. One of his tíos had scaled a tree and picked mangos, fresh and warm on his tongue when he peeled it with bared teeth. The Spanish there was fast like salsa, like merengue, like the bachata that Mami would dance with Mamá and then Papi. In Samwell the tadpoles reclaim sudaco. In Samwell they don’t seem to be able to comprehend Black and Latinx and Afro-Latino.
Dex is the only one who asks. The tadpoles, they get it. They might be mixed, they might be Italian, but they get it. Everyone else blinks, looks away, says, Okay, like they understand. Derek knows they don’t. He’s been the one who says, Soy dominicano, when some chilango goes, Y ese negro, no mames, even when it sounds like a compliment. But Dex asks.
He says, So you can be both?, when Derek needs someone to let him be angry about Latin American policy. Derek says, yes, and then, of course, and then, they’re not mutually exclusive, even if sometimes it feels like they are. Dex asks him to explain and he does. Not because he has to, not because Dex is demanding. Poindexter, all long limbs and red hair and freckles, looks more thoughtful than confused, like Latin America has never been something he’s had to think about. Derek already knows he’s never had to think about race. Of course he hasn’t. But lately he seems to want to.
Derek passed out in his bed at the beginning of the semester on accident, while the other had been unpacking. They ordered pizza afterwards, and then ate whatever pastry Bitty had whipped up on a whim. A woman had crossed the street as they approached her and Derek said, half-joking, Is it because of us or because of me?, and Dex said, I never thought of it like that. Derek tells him about Consuelo. Tells him about a cocolo grandfather and how nobody talks about the Haitians. Dex says, That’s fucked up, when he brings up Trujillo, and Derek says, Yeah, and the US too, and Dex nods, solemn.
He doesn’t touch pelo malo or mejorando la raza. He doesn’t like to talk about it, because Papi’s mother was a blonde Tajik who gave Derek her eyes. When he and Papi go to the Dominican with Mamá and Mami, they get a lot of lingering looks, and Mami always looks sour when her mother comments on it.
Blanca Varela wrote about the act of creation. She wrote about beauty after the darkest events. Derek wants to write about the color red, but the color doesn’t live in his family. What he has is plenty of brown to choose from. His mother’s surname is Moreno. Melanin lives everywhere. Red means something else in the old country. It means something else in America.
But he could make it mean love again, he thinks. He could erase the ugly for at least a moment. Red like flame, like the thin skin of an eyelid when he’s sprawled on a beach in the Caribbean. Red like mouths get when there are hours to dedicate to them. He thinks of red and when he opens his eyes all he can see is amber.
____
Mamá’s family migrated from Oaxaca to Arizona in the 1910’s. Her mother is Dutch, and the first of her family to be born in the US. He tells Dex this on a cool day in September. The temperature has been lapsing into autumn-territory, necessitating the use of a jacket – or a beanie, in Derek’s case.
Dex asks, Does she call herself Chicana?, and it makes Derek feel warm. Dex, under guise of fulfilling his ethnic studies requirement, is taking an introductory course on the presence of Latinos in the US. Latinx as a phrase is still confusing him.
Yeah, Derek says, she does. Calls herself Merican, like Cisneros.
Cisneros?
Sandra. You ever read the House on Mango Street?
No.
You’d like Woman Hollering Creek better.
They trade books. Dex meets him at the library with his lips downturned. I don’t even remember the child migration crisis.
Last year, Derek says, because he does. Mami spent hours crying, Mamá spent hours in the courthouse. Dex doesn’t look at him, stares down at the table between the two of them instead.
Rape, he says. Derek feels a chill. Assault. Murder. That’s what they’re risking. All for an American dream that isn’t even guaranteed.
Yeah, Derek says.
For a country that doesn’t even want them, Dex says, and looks at Derek.
Yeah, he says.
Sometimes he wonders what made his mother leave. She was in middle school when she managed to convince Derek’s Abua – her mother – to send her to the Bronx to live with an aunt who had left years before. From what Mami says it took her an entire summer to convince her, and when she finally managed it, she packed up everything she owned in a carry-on and a single piece of luggage before arriving in New York City in the beginning of September. She’s fuzzy on the details (or perhaps unwilling to share them) but her aunt, who had since married a Cuban from Uptown, hired a lawyer who handled everything. Mami started school a few weeks late and had to learn English within a semester, but she graduated at the top of her class and went to NYU on a full-ride.
That was where she met Papi, who she loves with all her heart, and who she would go on to marry and later divorce, siempre con cariño. (Derek has never felt sad about this, because neither Mami or Papi have ever been sad about it, because they still love each other, because without Mamá who would they be?). But not Papi or Mamá or Derek have ever been enough to keep Mami from going back to the island.
It was my home, she says, it’s where my heart lives, even if I couldn’t stay.
Derek doesn’t quite miss New York, though. He misses his mothers, his father, the way the cars would lull him to sleep. The first time he went home for Thanksgiving (not that they celebrate it) the sounds of the city kept him up, months after those first few nights where Samwell was too quiet for him. He misses the tangible things.
The truth is this: he feels as if New York doesn’t fit him. He feels like New York wants to kill him more fiercely than it wants him to find success. New York might have given his parents all the love in the world but he doesn’t think he has it in him to stomach another killer summer. Before he’d settled on Samwell he’d been absolutely dying to move to Chicago. To LA. To somewhere where there was another neighborhood dedicated to people who spoke the same language his mothers had raised him on. A little slice of shared culture. Something made him choose Samwell, though, and he finds himself happy there, most days.
There are days he’s miserable. Days where the needs of his communities cannot coexist and he finds himself having to align himself with only part of his identity, and not all of it. In the meantime, he researches the diaspora. He looks at his family tree, and how it stops at his grandfathers. He sits with his fellow classmates during practice and wonders what it’s like to be them, to have a history, to not have to carve a space for themselves between the countries that can’t make up their minds about them.
When he looks at him, it looks like Dex is learning. Derek is biased, of course, because he wants so much from Dex and from the world at large. The two of them sit together while Derek’s working on prose pieces and poems for his independent study and for his creative writing workshop. Dex lets Derek talk at him about declaring a major, and doesn’t bring up financial stability when Derek says he wants to be a writer. He asks, What kind?, and Derek stops short, because what a beautiful question.
Dex asks him this the same day Derek talks about Mamá. Dex has met Derek’s mothers. Derek has met Dex’s mother, a woman with the same red hair as he, albeit much longer. Her eyes are hazel, almost as light as Dex’s, and her smile is kind. Parents’ weekend the year before resulted in the five of them grabbing dinner together, even though Dex and Derek had a long, long way to go before they would call themselves friends. But it happened, just like this thing that Derek feels in his chest seems to be happening too.
Dex has a mouth like a dream. Derek’s grown up on a lifetime of que guapo, hola chulo, buendía amor, but nothing has ever caught him off-guard like Dex. It’s not even the way they rile each other up anymore (even if they still do, even if it’s all in good fun). It’s something about that face, that voice, the way he puts himself and others together even when it seems like he shouldn’t.
In October, as the leaves change colors, he reads a poem to a classmate. She has a name that sounds like dirty Europe. Her last name tells differently, and her accent in Spanish sings a newer song. She rolls her tongue like it’s second-nature and she doesn’t say his vernacular is ugly like some of the other Latinxs he’s met in New York. She knows who Blanca Varela is, and for that he thinks he could love her one day.
This is a sad poem, she tells him when he’s done reciting. Why?
She asks questions that make him want to tear up all his poems and rewrite them one by one. She writes pieces stripped of everything but the necessary. It’s like Ezra Pound met Danez Smith met Alfonsina Storni, only with less fascism (please, give him everything with less fascism). When she wants clarity she gets it, by making Derek, or whoever’s in workshop that day, turn their inspirations into full sentences before they condense it back into a stanza.
I’m a little sad, Derek admits, something he won’t do in the Haus. Dex and Chowder will sometimes help him smooth out poems, but never the ones that crack something deep inside of him in an effort to fix it. Bitty overheard him reciting one once and looked ready to call the university’s health services, and the last thing he needs is Bitty going overboard and threatening to call his parents. He’s never done so, but Derek wouldn’t put it past him.
I like it, his friend says, and then, cut the biblical references.
Derek laughs. It feels easy.
____
Derek wakes up reciting «Juego amoroso»: la nubecilla rosada y tonta / que ya no es. He wakes up thinking of the long lines of his partner’s limbs, the way his hair starts to curl a few days before his monthly haircut, the way bruises from bad hits bloom purple across his chest. He wonders what would happen if he reached out to touch one. Where would his hands fit best?
Piel demorada sobre otra, he says in the stillness of his room. Eso haremos a solas.
Dex cannot speak Spanish. The consonants fit awkwardly in his mouth, like they’re trying to fall out. He can’t roll his r’s, the double-l’s confuse him. But his eyebrows furrow when he makes a mistake and yesterday Derek caught him using Duolingo to practice.
I’d like to travel one day, Dex said as defense, and maybe Derek was imagining the lost, with you, but he’s lying if he says he didn’t wish it were true.
It’s mid-October and Derek has a midterm in three days. Latin American Poetics, from Darío to Neruda. In bed, he thinks of all the poems he needs to review and rewrite and turn in. He stretches out, skin cooling as the air touches him, and wonders how warm he could stay if someone else would stay with him. When he crawls out of bed he calls Dex.
Meet me in the quad, he says, and Dex huffs.
Did you just wake up?
Yes.
It’s ten o’clock.
It’s Saturday.
An indulgent sigh. See you in fifteen.
Dex is wearing a thick brown sweater. It looks soft, unfairly comfortable-looking. On Dex it’s particularly striking. Derek, like always, wants to reach out and touch. They find a sunny spot towards the center of the quad, and Dex pulls a blanket out of his backpack.
Smart, Derek says, genuine. Dex rolls his eyes.
Have you even started studying?
Nope.
Don’t you have two midterms in the next week?
Derek blinks. Modernism meets Post-Modernism is next Thursday. Shit.
Idiot, Dex says, but it sounds so fond that Derek lets himself hope.
Shut it, Poindexter, Derek says, no heat behind the words, how’s Advanced Informatics treating you?
Like shit, Dex says, and Derek just laughs. When he looks at Dex he sees blinding gold, from the flash of his teeth to the pleased look in his eyes. He makes a deal with himself: next Friday.
Next Friday, of course, is an absolute shit-show of a game. They win by the skin of their teeth, and Derek sees red in all of them, bruises stretching across ribs and thighs. He sees Dex stretch, wince, press a hand to his skin. He’s torn between being angry he let his partner get hurt, and wanting to put his own bruises on him – hips, shoulders, collarbone.
Bitty says, There’s some low-fat Baked Alaska beggin’ to be made, and before he can even say, if anyone’s interested, have the locker room is on their feet, ready to follow him to the Haus. He catches Dex’s gaze, his skin going pink in the rising heat of the room. Derek grins, and Dex returns it best he can, face glowing, eyes crinkling up. The air rushes out of Derek in a sigh, and he gets up to pull his clothes on before he does something dumb, like get caught staring.
Dex is lingering when he finishes, and Derek must be projecting, because there’s something soft and shy about the way Dex says, I figured we could walk to the Haus together.
Sounds good, Derek says, and everything else he wants to say is too much.
The night is chilly, night having fallen hours ago. There are stars in the sky, not like in Consuelo but enough that he can remember. He nudges Dex.
Do you know any constellations?
Dex looks at him, and then the sky. Yeah, he says finally, and points. That’s the Lyre.
Derek tries to look at where he’s pointing. Where?
There.
I can’t see it.
Jesus, Dex says, but he gets close to Derek, well within his orbit. He takes Derek’s hand, gently, gently, and points. Right there.
Oh. Derek wants to kiss him. He says, Thanks. They walk slowly.
Outside of the Haus, Derek stops Dex from going in with his hand on his wrist.
Hey, he says.
Yeah?
Derek looks at him for what feels like a long time. He takes in the sharp cheekbones, the strong eyebrows. The pursed mouth and open expression. Dex is so easy to read, and Derek can’t believe he ever found it hard to figure it out. The other stuff, yeah, he can see why Dex never challenged it. He feels so hopeful now, knowing that Dex is trying to bridge the gap. He wants it to be enough soon, more than enough.
He says, My parents are coming up in two weeks. I have a performance.
Dex raises his eyebrows. Alright.
Derek takes a deep breath. D’you wanna grab dinner with us? I wanted you to meet my dad.
Dex blinks at him. Says, I. Yeah. Sure.
You sure?
Yeah. I’d love to, he says after a moment, cheeks going pink again.
Good, Derek says. He steps away. Remind me to – remind me to read you the poem before then. I wanna know what you think.
I don’t know much about that stuff.
I still wanna know.
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un poema de desesperación
canta mi corazón.
ahí está. ahí lo oigo.aquí ando yo, con nada a mi nombre.
con nada que me importa.
con nada que tú querrás.oye. óyeme a mí.
óyele a mi corazón
que silba este amor dulce,
este amor tenaz, feroz, veraz.ahí está tu boca
aquí mi boca. estos labios partidos
como en un exhalo.
como una bendición.
algo fuera de mi ámbito.canto con mi boca,
con mi voz. te canto
para que sepas que toda esta emoción
vive en mí, como pudiera
vivir en ti, entre nos dos.te doy esta canción
que es más de una de amor,
de devoción, de provocación.te doy esta canción,
de mi
a ti.
d.m. nurse
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