herederos de cero

Sheila Maldonado

I’ve returned from the question         the motherland 
            a continually illegitimate relationship
I’m a pretend immigrant       afraid of coats and the cold
            stunned by space and the sun   up in the face 
landlocked      behind the barbed wire of mama’s house 

what did I do there     scratch twitch stare 
           wandered with a prima     and her daughters
was asked about the prima      who should have been there
           she left the world      after her mama   mi tía   se fue 
nadie era nadie           en esa casa     only the men

it made my mama sick             to see me leave 
           into the hot night     of her origins
I return for the right    to walk in the dark
           like the black cat family
that roamed our alley           in the valley of Sula

if I woke up at a decent hour      I caught the colibrí
           little brown red god     came around 9   10am
humming into a tree   of little red stems
           never know names 
                       a place of teeny overlooked gods

I drank tea      at the white iron table
           another tía gave mama      they got on so well 
about their nests           in the capital of slurs
           will I be the only bird to be about the tree 
last one flitting           do we want me to be

Copyright © 2024 by Sheila Maldonado. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 20, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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about this poem

“I wrote this after my last visit to [San Pedro Sula in] Honduras, my family’s homeland—my first time there since the pandemic. We were there without my Tía Gloria and my cousin Ela, whom we lost. Honduras has always been tough to visit, politically and naturally intense, beautiful, but being there often feels like a vacation in lockdown. I wonder how we can keep this connection to such a hard place, how we continually lose it. I was thinking about the Maya ancestors on that land, creating the idea of zero independent of other civilizations; [and] that we are heirs of zero, a tremendous concept of nothingness.”
—Sheila Maldonado

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