Queridas tías
Saturday tía Talia’s husband took us to Manhattan (tío Jack calls it “The City”) in a silver car that stinks like leather, but I couldn’t see anything from the back squeezed between Tita and Cesar. Who wants to see a bunch of buildings anyway. I thought tío Jack would look like a movie star. All I could see at first were his huge hips and butt, like two sacs of rice on top of two oak trees stuffed in brown pants. We have oak trees in the courtyard. Papá says they’re pretty. I prefer trees I can climb, like guanabana and mango. I don’t see the big deal about marrying some goofy gringo, and he’s twice Talia’s size. I like the expressway at night, especially when it’s drizzly. It reminds me of Christmas with all those red lights. That’s what I wrote for school when Mrs. McRitchie told us to write about something we like. I was happy that papá’s friend Magnolia wasn’t with us on Saturday. She laughs a lot and wears short dresses like a teenager, and mamá gets quiet and mad when she’s with us. Tío Jack didn’t want people hearing us talk Spanish. Told papá not to open the car windows, even when we said we were hot.
Luisa says, I was born in the city of Ibagué, known as Colombia’s music capital, and the traditional music of that area always includes a tiple.
In our dream band, on: Colombian tiple
Luisa Caycedo-Kimura is a Colombian-born writer, translator, and educator. Her honors include a Connecticut Office of the Arts Emerging Recognition Award, a John K. Walsh Residency Fellowship at the Anderson Center, an Adrienne Reiner Hochstadt Fellowship at Ragdale, and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and Best of the Net nominee, her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, Rattle, Mid-American Review, RHINO, Diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Nashville Review, The Night Heron Barks, On the Seawall, Sunken Garden Poetry 1992-2011, and elsewhere.
Ran Off With the Star Bassoon 