I will never be able to write poetry that my mother understands

In English, I write a flow of flowery soliloquies about my country,

      about my people,

           about her

Love letters of my affection all dedicated in some way to her,

      but decorated in syllables that just don't translate right

People who say that loves knows no language or barrier obviously have never know this blackhole type of      

      love

A love where I butcher the only language my mother has ever understood,

     where there's confusion and misunderstandings,

            and this pressure,

                   this tension that rises when I realize that no amount of pretty words will be able to build a

                           bridge across this cavern of ‘no entiendos’

My mother spit me out an ocean away to save me from the painful teeth of her lover, her home,

     but my heart is caught between two sets of them now

I'm not sure which one of us is from the alien world anymore

I have an accent in every language so I'm not really sure where I'm even from

I'm Cuban but I am not from there,

     it seems like I am not from anywhere

Which is to say feeling like a foreign thing in your mother's arms is the most painful type of affection known

I can't even tell my mother te adoro sometimes without feeling like an imposter in the flesh

This tongue is not careful,

     it is not considerate,

           every breathe from it doesn't extend a love ballad like hers does

Love is synonymous for home,

     for a soil that is ours,

           but my words have no roots these

This type of love is one that grows and festers, a rabid beast that attacks its owner everytime it realizes you don't really know the person you love

              and the person who loves you really can't say that she's ever known you either

Love flickers in the corner of my mother's lips,

     but dies in mistranslation

So the older I grow, the quieter I become

The more I write eulogies for the bits of her identity that seem to have withered

I illustrate a mourning that she feels, but will never truly understand

I am my mother's salvation

I am my mother's greatest betrayal

We have stolen each others voices and now can't find our ways home

So the older I grow, the quieter I become

The more I write eulogies for the bits of her identity that seem to have withered

I illustrate a mourning that she feels, but will never truly understand

I write of a silence every immigrant mothers seem to invent

Or did this silence invent our mothers?

Is heritage a gaping mouth with a quivering tongue that seems to collapse upon itself?

My mother will never be able to understand my poetry

And my writing sometimes seems to be a lot that remains of me