What She Made

It was then she remembered
That even though she'd
Fulfilled dreams,
Attained goals . . .

Somehow she'd managed.
Not to get pregnant at thirteen,
which would have shocked her parents, but not the doctors
at the clinic.
Not to get hitched when she was seventeen.
this her parents would have loved ¡in Church, just like
her cousins!
Not to forget her Spanish, the language of her dreams,
fine to teach to Gringos, but never to Hispanics.

. . . she would not escape Pain.
She'd mixed and matched her choices
and got what she came up with:
an education that no one expected,
a job that could be a career,
¡a loving man who cooked and cleaned!
a
lovely
child,
a house and a garden with yellow tulips in the spring.
But she glimpsed the deepest desperations
in the very sources of her happiness.
It was then she sat on her kitchen floor
and let out quiet screams that didn't come
from her mouth.
Maybe from her gut or her tired womb.
Maybe from the mouth of her grandmother
or from the pit of her father's stomach.
Or from the empty wombs of her teachers.
From some far away place.

Isabel "Rosi" Espinal is a Reference Librarian / Outreach Specialist at the W.E.B. Dubois Library at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where she is active in a number of Library organizations working to improve Latino and Latin American collections, including Reforma: The National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish Speaking. Her chapbook of poetry, Clean Sheets, was published in 1996.

This poem appeared in the loose-leaf chapbook Clean Sheets in 1996 as part of the La Candelaria series and was later reprinted in Tertuliando/Hanging Out (1997), an anthology published by the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute. Reprinted by permission of the author.

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