by Cynthia J. Roman Cabrera
I wish I understood my mother’s mystery. I feel the sting like a bang on my funny bone when people share positive memories of their mothers. I am envious of people who know their mothers. I know my mother by association. We are kinfolk, but not chosen folk. I would like to think that I would choose my mom, but we have always had a distant mother-enemy relationship. I think she tried to chip away at me by having me absorb myself, wilt away with a wandering shame, one that never seemed to know where it was coming or where it would go. Once, she looked at my big toe and told me I needed to have surgery because some unbeknownst thing was enterrados into my skin– and that shit needed to be dealt with before it was engulfed into the folds of my toe. I walked around feeling weird and anxious, like my feet were the replica of the mutant fungus foot from Courage the Cowardly Dog. I compared my feet with my sisters’ and did not feel repulsed by our similar feet.
I have developed a sad type of sympathy for her; she is a sum of trauma. The silence she carries is the heavily draped windows of another time, another life. She has left me with the sensation of aimlessness; the very atoms of my body are strangers without knowing who she was, is, and could have been. She is a sum of all that could have been, all the broken systems she had to navigate. I wish I knew how to be me without the thought that the same strange atoms invading my body are indeed invaders. Am I to become that insistent, petrifying quiet she has sworn herself to keep? Just to become another cliche of a sad woman in adulthood. But make it Dominican with a dash of repressed sadness. I am rewriting my genetic code as we speak. Give me time while I heal.
I want to know if she held joy in her eyes when she held me. To feel the gentle ternura of a young, scared, immigrant mother in New York. I want to feel if she rubbed her belly with love. I remember once when I came back from college, she passed by me in the living room and touched my face so softly and said, “ay mija, y porque tu no te quedas?” It was the first time she touched me like mothers on TV do. As if she loved me. Her hands were warm and soft. I want to know if the rough lines on her thumb came from some random accident that broke her nail. I want to know if we mix up our traumas since we are of the same vein. I will never forget that sensation of pure love. I felt like a fiend searching for that fix.
I wish I knew how to step back in time when she was a schoolgirl in a strict, Catholic school in DR, where she would walk home from school to have lunch with nena, my great-grandmother, while her mother was out working. I want to see her in her school uniform, dipping fresh bread into thick hot chocolate with her sisters, mis tias, and know who she was then. Was she overprotective like me with her sisters? Did she dream? Who did she want to become? Knowing her in relation to the rest of the family that we hardly knew, if only through long-distance calls. She would pass us the phone, brutally ordering, “habla con tu tía,” and we would awkwardly ask for bendiciones and wish the conversation to end, not because of anything bad, but because the stranger on the other line was just too removed for true connection.
I am proud that my life is slowly unraveling itself of the grip my mother created to exist fully in my body. People say that fish living in fish tanks stop growing and adopt the size of the tank. In actuality, the tank creates a toxic environment from their waste which prohibits them from reaching their potential in a poorly sized home. I was that sad freaking fish. Swimming in the filth of my mom’s bitter words, judgments, beatings, and silence. Shedding the tortured years of neglect from a parent I had given my fullest faith to. I had this strange thought that mothers had unconditional love and tolerance for their children. Like mothers were always supposed to be there. I am slowly realizing that motherhood is a field that is unwavering in its commitment to stripping women of their power to choose. I can only guess that pregnancy at her young age forced my mother to choose imprisonment. It did not matter what path she took because she decided I was not worth her attention. She never showed that she wanted me but she also never lied. Almost like a priest who holds your secrets and castigates you. One is not better than the other. There are different sides to this story and she has refused to tell me hers. I know mine to be true because I hold those pissy memories alongside some very useful multiplication and overthinking.
PEANUT N°3
by Ginger Forte
CYNTHIA J. ROMAN CABRERA is a Dominican and Puerto Rican native of Brooklyn, New York, who grew up in the Bronx and Washington Heights. She is a storyteller, essayist and poet exploring culture and identity, cityscape, familismo, and the healing of her inner child. Her work often uses Spanglish as a literary tool to tell stories on the diasporic challenges of first generation US-born people. In her freetime, she nurtures her love of learning and reading in cute bookstores, and chases down any opportunity to satisfy her inner comelona. A trained researcher and evaluator in Public Health, she is energized by tackling complex, systemic social and civic justice issues. She is also a femme person in love. By sharing who she is as a human, she hopes to invite others to break open the writing field with their stories. She has been published in The Brooklyn Poets Anthology, changing womxn collective, HerStry, Breadcrumbs, Moko Magazine, Spanglish Voces, and The Bronx Magazine. During the spring of 2021, Cynthia was named a Brooklyn Poets Fellow. Her forthcoming book, belonging, on self: poems on dominirican healing, is her debut collection of poems.
GINGER FORTE is a multidisciplinary artist, born in La Linea de la Concepcion (Cadiz, Spain), graduated in Fine Arts (University of Granada, Spain, 2020) with areas of interest covering creative practice, theoretical research and art diffusion. Forte has held numerous solo exhibitions in her hometown (La Linea de la Concepcion) during 2012 and 2013 in Cruz Herrera Museum and in the School of Art of Algeciras (Cadiz, Spain) in 2014. During her Erasmus stay in the Greek island of Syros, she held a group exhibition titled “Syros Open Art Studio” at the Municipal Library of Ermoupolis in 2018. She also held a group exhibition at the Athens University of Fine Arts, titled “Νέες μορφές σύγχρονης έκφρασης” (New Forms of Contemporary Expression) in 2018. In 2019 she exhibited her work at Manuel de Falla Theater (Granada, Spain) in a group exhibition titled “A la Calle.” And finally, she exhibited her project “Destination of a Seed” in a solo show at the Art Center of Granada Rey Chico (Granada, Spain) in December 2021 and at Totart in Valencia (Spain) in 2023. Forte currently lives and works in Edinburgh (Scotland).
Ignatian Literary Magazine 