lavandería automática

I tapped my heel against our drying laundry,
a spicy rhythm matching the salsa
smoothly soaring across the cold, tiled floor
and two continents
to my tiny ears, la música de la vida.
I watched my mother’s rounded hips,
each hill curving into a silky valley of tanned skin
resembling grassy hills she carried me across,
shake with wild, sultry recklessness
to the twists and twills of Hector Lavoe’s prayers.
Holding a pair of her brother’s underpants
madly above her head, as if she were waving
a flag of liberation
from her self-afflicted American nightmare,
she let the salsa eat her alive,
devour her quiet lips and tiny ears,
lick up her sweet, brown skin
and drink her melted Latino soul—liberación.
For a moment she forgot where she was,
no longer on the corner of 43rd and Clark
but in her mother’s clay kitchen
scrubbing the stains from her father’s cotton shirt
and smiled, her lips folding into her mouth
in a funny, unnatural sonrisa.
She ran her fingers across my cheek,
the smell of fabric softener
permanently staining her slender hands,
“Mi neña,” she whispered,
folded quiet lips meeting each cheek.
Long nights in the unsleeping city
she clutched the glass pane of our only window,
her white nightgown a glowing ghost
of a broken woman, a weeping Llorona,
the soft city lights twinkling against her wet skin
as if she was to drown me and her.
My uncle Tito slipped me dried pieces of fruit
I would suck dry as he twirled my mother
into a cyclone of laundry goddess,
salsa a rabid Mexican chupacabra.
He barely touched my mother’s hands,
instead their skin forever hovering
in suspended animation,
eternity drawn into a single moment
as if they made contact
they would ignite a spark
and fly breathlessly through the clouds,
nervous they would fall into their mother’s garden
and crush her green peppers.
My mother shook her head
as she pulled out dyed socks from the wash,
cursing in Spanish under her breath
as if for that moment I forgot my native tongue
and could forgive her sudden brashness.
Sometimes when she pulled out one less sock,
she would pull her arm dramatically across her brow,
each lost sock a rich piece of culture
drowning in American assimilation,
each lost sock like losing a piece of me.
Her face would twist into a confused knot
as shuffling through the grocer’s
I would pull down Jiffy peanut butter
and gallons of Rocky Road Ben and Jerry’s
absent-mindedly into our cart
among the fragile huitlacoche, tomatillos, smoked pasilla chile.
Walking down dirty sidewalks of el barrio,
shopping bags balanced between each of our hands
my mother turned English labels towards herself
so the little piece of Mexico would not be exposed
to such generic, American disregard.
I watched hoards of men, machismos,
run their hands up my mother’s inner thighs,
their moustaches thick and paternal,
rough against the silk of her brown skin,
caresses matching the blows of trumpets
from the eternal salsa.
Summer nights we sat side by side on the dryer
licking frozen limes as we lost ourselves in the thick air,
the night sky swallowing us as we dragged our laundry
across el barrio, eventually migrating to the curb
where the stars ate our Latino souls.