Eneida Alcalde
Eneida Alcalde’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in literary outlets such Huizache, The McNeese Review, Magma Poetry, and Art by the People’s Moving Words. She graduated with an MA in Creative Writing & Literature from Harvard University’s Extension School and is a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop. Eneida’s poetry draws inspiration from her young daughter as well as her Chilean-Puerto Rican roots and the places she has called home. Learn more at eneidaescribe.com.
Plush
El Payaso Plim Plim
arrived in a box with
rotting oranges and a note
handwritten in a foreign script
I do not understand,
wearing tattered clothes,
missing his golden cape.
He sits inside my daughter’s
arms as we watch videos
of him with his friends
sing songs about sharing
and caring, thank you
and please, compromise
and safety first—
children who believe
in colorful worlds,
that goodness prevails.
My daughter stares into his
unmoving eyes, kisses his smile
stitched across his face.
Plim Plim stays silent:
None of his friends escaped
the war in Ukraine.
Mothers hide amongst the rubble,
sewing children’s wounds instead of
more dolls like him.
We witness
a younger version of Plim Plim
dance amongst flower fields
before the missiles cut in,
plugged to our screened devices
with every tick searching
for a heart-shaped Lion
knowing not even Cheburashka’s
song will save the day.
Remember the Window Washer Who Fell
fifty stories
from a skyscraper
cleaning windows
so far from home.
How the world-
class tower shook
upon impact
rattling tea cups
in residents’ grasps.
How the news
remained unreported
in the media. How
building managers
ignored questions
and complaints of
once sparkling
windows turned gray.
How a year passed
and no one applied
to the washer post.
How authorities never
mentioned his death
as if a sand storm
swallowed him whole.
Anonymous
You texted feliz cumpleaños, promised from this point I will hear you, declaring you love me. Months later this remains your last statement.
Some nights I’m our home on the rock hill overlooking Pacific seas and the wealth we surrendered, back when father and I visited, laughed by the woodfire orange glow luminating stories from darkness, abuela and abuelo and past lives who brought us here.
Some mornings I’m a lighthouse on the cusp of memory piercing mist before first light, enduring wave after wave in silence, searching old maps, peeling puzzle pieces, tracing pebble paths leading to and away what we held dear.
I haven’t heard your voice in two years when I called in the middle of the night and you answered
to hear:
father died.
I search and I search, I cannot find our home, not a footprint or eco appear.
Santa Valentina
(for Valentina Orellana-Peralta)
Maybe we crossed paths
under the shadow of the Andes
one afternoon walking to the metro
or school or playground to pick up candy
or gelato to enjoy on our stroll through Providencia.
You, a young girl with your mother and father.
Me, an adult with a mother and father.
Different lives, different paths rooted in
the same soil of sea and mountain earth.
Perhaps I glanced at your pigtails,
overheard you giggle eating cabritas,
walking out of a movie theater
holding father’s hand or
grandfather’s or grandmother’s
who picked you up from school, treated
you to your favorite cookie, a mantecado
before arriving to the movies to catch the latest
Disney flick. Maybe you sang to the songs or
cried when Bambi was orphaned, left without
a mother, and your father or grandfather or
grandmother held you close, whispering:
No te preocupes niña, es solo una película,
solo pasa en las películas, no es verdad.
Maybe you dreamt of the country
of Disney, where movies are made,
thought of the Magical Kingdom,
the birthplace of Mickey and friends.
Maybe the American Dream’s seed spawned
in you that day. Or maybe not. I mean,
you were a four-year-old girl on an
evening out with her grandfather or
father or grandmother, your
world together, never thinking
you’d be pulled out a decade later,
fly for the first time, maybe arrive in
Hollywood, land of Disney Dreams. Imagine
your first day of school, made-in-the-USA
kids side-eyeing your pleated skirt,
scoffing at your shiny mary janes,
poking fun at your inability to
speak good English, teaching you
a naughty word or two, declaring
with colonial authority: you don’t
look Latina, you don’t act Latina, no way
you are X, Y, Z—no matter what you do or
say—your foreign glow of unmarked innocence
assaulted left and right in this place of cheese, mice,
and hooded men. But their taunts never stopped you:
on Mama’s days off, you went out to paint the
town red shopping till you dropped,
digging through clearance racks in
malls bigger than you ever wanted,
twirling in tutus and silky tops, sunshine
t-shirts, true-blue blue jeans, chunky boots,
ruby heels, red-white-and-blue sparkly hats you
swore you’d wear the day Papa finally arrived,
until one day you dropped, babygirl, in the
land of Disney, collateral damage or victim
depending on the news source, dying in
a shoot-out, Bambi in her mother’s arms,
Hollywood style, police finding you hours later,
a pool of wine-soaked
rose petals around your shattered crown.
Maybe I wrote this for you
because no one writes for shy girls
from Chile uprooted to the land of
Disney where children’s dreams come
true or cease to exist, remembering beyond
the headlines and clicks we matter, we die, we live
between mass shootings and run of the mill, everyday
shootings, tired circulating events, your memory not
even a footnote, buried in the latest trend. I’m sorry,
maybe I wrote this because my father died as did
my grandparents and my mother hangs by
cancer’s thread and I need to remember
what it was like to eat a bowl of candy
without a care to stake this claim
for little girls like you and me
and my daughter and her friends daring
to be little girls eating cookies, ice cream,
dreaming big in make believe malls, twirling dresses:
we are blood and flesh, not once upon a time stories,
hold on to us, dear world,
do not churn us away.