Gringa.

Anaïs Deal-Márquez

Up the Staircase Quarterly (2022)

An insult,

like you’re forgetting the right way to breathe, and you don’t know where you came from. A nightmare of the white girls who yell at their moms and yank your braids at recess.

Gringa

like your blood is diluting itself in the winter, watering down the tongue-twisters of your childhood in melted snow, you’re mixing up dictionaries and stories across time and space, as though the first eight years of your life weren’t in a soft space against ocean and mountains.

Gringa,

they call you as a joke because you forgot how to say huitlacoche and what it looks like and how epazote tastes in a bowl of beans, and you chase words slipping through your fingers trying to get the truck out of the mud during the rainy season but this time you are across the continent without your tíos to do the heavy lifting.