Eric Odynocki

Mamá sighs with relief

She shakes her head when one channel 

rally-cries the border! the border! 

It’s never the northern, says my sister on the opposite couch. 

My sister who takes after babcia, not abuela.

Honey brown hair, button nose, even 

her folded hands as she sleeps. Not 

mamá’s black halo, large eyes. Echoes 

of pogrom and wheat not conquista and maíz. 

Once, with my sister in the stroller, 

a neighbor leaned in and whispered to mamá, 

Is she his? Another time someone asked 

if she was babysitting. Love was not the only reason 

mamá kept papa’s photo in her wallet. 

When another channel reveals who the gunman 

targeted in that Walmart, mamá shuts off the news 

and looks at my sister. I’m glad, mamá says. 

My sister looks up from her phone. 

I’m so glad you don’t look like me. 

Subtitles

Scene opens: I am five years old sitting 

beneath the magenta and cyan swirls 

of the amates hanging in our living room. 

So much luster on something so withered. 

Three paintings like sentinels watching 

a son in a strange land learn about his 

mamá’s homeland while watching Donald Duck 

galavant through Mexico with Panchito Pistoles, 

a red rooster in sombrero and chaleco de charro. 

In one scene, a dancer whirls in a dress 

of red and pink blossoms on black. 

The shivering marimbas in minor waltz 

is my favorite melody. I ask mamá to name it 

and she answers, La Sandunga, and I love 

how the name undulates on my tongue, 

a name that, in mamá’s voice, reverbs with ancestors. 

Flashforward thirty years and that movie starts 

with a disclaimer. I see another cartoon 

by the same studio but this time the story unfolds 

not through tourist eyes. Another familiar song plays. 

And when I say familiar, I mean like family. 

A matriarch sings La Llorona and it’s not 

background noise. 

  There is also a series 

streaming for children like I was: one foot here 

and another elsewhere. A fantasy 

series that supplants the fog of Medieval Europe 

with a Mesoamerican sun. No knights with steel 

but warriors with obsidian. No flitting fae but poised pantheons. 

Flashback: childhood going to the library on weekends. 

It was easy to find hardbacks of the tales papa 

would share from his armchair; legends that serfs 

would tell each other by hearths while winter roared outside. 

So much glossy paper and petrykivka of Baba Yaga, 

Prince Ivan, and Koschei. So much red and gold on black. 

When I looked for similar characters but with 

Spanish or pre-Columbian names, the cards 

in the catalog hissed into a silent moral. 

Of who can be the saved. The heroes. The miraculous.