El Andar Award for Literary Excellence

the el andar prize for literary excellence

POETRY: SECOND PLACE
Mouthing Off by Ina Cumpiano

Puerto Rican poet and translator Ina Cumpiano is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, the Iowa Writers Workshop and the University of California. She won the Jaime Suárez/Editores Salvadoreños Poetry award and the New Millennium Writings Award.

’Mano, antes de ayer or maybe
yesterday Papi called you
machorro — not macho but
                                              that other thing

that’s worse for him, worse even than
sinvergüenza or maricón, he said you were shooting
blanks, you,
                                              the last of the line,

since cousin Febo had only girls
and my kids don’t have el nombre
and he doesn’t like them
                                              that much anyhow.

Se suponía you’d have a houseful
of mocosos always fastidiando underfoot, all machitos
in his mind, running around
                                              with their cositas

dangling, fleshy, pink beneath their oversize
undershirts, bien monos and
ready to do it
                                              to all the nenas

whose tiny purple-blossom coños waited
just for them.
Me he called
                                              a corteja
when I refused to live alone — how do you
tell los vecinos — it didn’t matter
que ya estaba vieja,
                                              or that at my age

my new old man makes me coffee in the morning
and rubs my back at night —, no me chaves, I said,
but por dentro, duele, duele
                                              and I don’t forget

Ricardo, his father, did it to las sirvientas
in the cane fields and to la otra
in the back shack he kept her in;
                                              he kept busy

when Doña Inez was indisposed. He was clearly
no machorro. She turned a blind eye
but saw him clearly with the other one:
                                              pendejo, she muttered, pendejo.