Mande by Andrea Chow

mi mami me grita de la cocina

my mother yells to me from the kitchen

plates banging, fan whirring

I heard her the first time, but I still yell back, mande

I can smell something cooking in a pot

or a pan

maybe it’s albondigas

maybe it’s the weight of all of us living together

family that loves itself dearly but suffocates under the powerless hierarchy

it smells like dinner

it smells like authority

huele como autoridad        

she wants me to taste her soup

or help set the table

or eat

or lose weight

it burns my tongue,

my language burns my tongue.

I FaceTime my abuela during lockdown and ni hao ma catches in my throat

I said goodbye to her for the last time in March and the twai kin swirls in my mind

I don’t know how to spell, so cluttered syllables spill out from my mouth

my words a tangled ball of phonetics

I have never met anybody who speaks like me

I will never meet anybody who speaks like me

my Spanish is painful

but my Cantonese is even worse

it is not my own

it has been shoved down my throat

it burns my tongue like the caldo, caliente from the pot

the hot soup

my mom quiere que lo pruebe pero me esta quemando

she wants me to taste it but it’s burning me

from my room I can’t hear her clearly

words become muddled and throw themselves against the walls on the way down

they collapse on the floor before they make it to me

wilting under the weight of

motherhood 

colonialism

genocide

confusion

chaos

family.

I cannot hear my mother in her lost language as she calls to me from the kitchen

I suspect that it burns her tongue, too

I yell back, mande

I yell back, please repeat that      

I yell back, command me

I yell back, may your will be done, Your Highness

it burns my tongue

it’s fire down my throat

my ancestors ignite themselves

royalty fallen from the teetering rim of Heaven

not the white man’s “heaven”

Heaven like my mom’s kitchen

Heaven like warm soup

Heaven cooking in a pot

Heaven is knowing how to spell

God is a mirror image of myself on Her knees, dusty and scratched up and forehead to the earth

white man striking Her head with his heel

mande because I am subservient

mande because my tongue controls me

mande because my grandparents speak to me but I don’t understand

mande because I am not quite sure who I am

mande from the brown girl

mande because, what, like, you can’t just ask me where I’m from?

mande because I am condemned

and it burns my tongue.

Andrea (she/they) is a Central American/Xicana/Asian slam poet from Ventura, California and a student at Yale studying Ethnicity, Race and Migration. They often write about their relationships with land and language, but really just like the cool sounds that words make. They can be found @andrea.chow. Cover art is by Juliza Garcia, and can be found on THE VISUAL.