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238 doña feliciana Pat Mora Ven. Come inside. Es mi casa, two rooms I built from wood scraps. Look at the nails, bent como mis dedos. They spilled us like garbage, the landowners with the big trucks, spilled us in this bare field with our pots, sheets, shoes stiff and old as tree bark. At first, niños raced across the land, gulping in all the new wide air. They ran laughing into the emptiness, no trees, no mangoes and avocados lying in the shade, no houses, no plastic water buckets, no tomato plants, no small fires, no gallinas, nothing, no thing in their way. I brought just one plant, a little cilantro, placed it in this blue tin pot. Smell it, even a little green helps in all this dust. Es mi casa. I am my family, widow without children. Mis compañeros and I have no land, not even a stream of water thin as a thread. The first nights in this bare place, mosquitoes sucked and sucked until I had to build a house. Alone, at sixty-three. My arms hurt from dragging boards. My head ached from banging, but I lifted my house up, made myself a roof. See? Two rooms: here I sleep, here I cook arroz. the real self Nights I lie in the dark and listen to the wind, whisper to my viejo, “I did it. I built myself a house. I hung my blue tin pot outside my door.” Copyright © 1995 by Pat Mora. First appeared in Aqua Santa: Holy Water, published by Beacon Press. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. 239 ...

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