BIO
Millicent Borges Accardi is the author of two poetry books, most recently Only More So (Salmon). Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Fulbright, CantoMundo, Creative Capacity, the California Arts Council, Yaddo, Fundação Luso-Americana, and Barbara Deming Foundation. She lives in Topanga, CA.
Unlearning America’s languages
From, “Lowering Your Standards for Food Stamps” by Sheryl Luna
We spit and spill and sit on our hands,
trying not to react. We found philosophical absolution
in not knowing, feigning knowledge that ours was the generation
where we were form-fitted into a dress of forgetting
language culture, food, Fit in Fit in Fit in
disappear into America and all of its joys
and death threats because that is a white wall
of promise there it is in front of you my friend.
A wall to blend into and hope for the best.
Be public-charming and the opposite of deliberate,
Un-thoughtful and loose. Let’s wait quietly
before the others speak and never let on
the name of your street or where your family
came from and that was and is how it was.
Parents came to California to rise above while
blending inside a fairytale Knott’s Berry Farm where
Old McDonald feeds the chickens and a city where
kids ride bikes and play Pong. It was sleep
and rise and keep damn quiet about anything
different. Tell the counselor you will ride the bus
and stave off the earthquakes, embracing a future
that does not resemble any past you heard whispered
and fought about at night after bedtime, where
we lie in bed and draw words in the air, spelling
out where we came from.
Come Angels! Come Beasts!
From “Angels in the Sun” by Ruben Quesada
And it talked about how the younger ones
were standing
out and they were naïve but the older ones knew and this boy
standing out in the parking lot of this father Cimarron;
Starlight, Skydancer, maybe Cinnamon.
For years he would abuse and beat, making the boys suck him
and he was able to avoid
until no one said anything Even after he retired
and went to an old priests’ home,
where he relaxed and sipped brandy
talking about things.
He escaped it all.
I was trying to figure out when my older brother went there
1958. 1959. He came home ten years later,
Broken, on the couch. Crying
Before he got work at a fish cannery.
The time frame of an article about the priest
Was vague maybe the 1970’s, and it was talking about
St Anthony’s and Santa Barbara
Franciscan seminaries.
The name there, I mean,
If my brother was not actually touched,
he would have been aware.
Or, he noticed how certain students
Were singled out as weak or pretty.
The guy that wrote the article said
Those who stayed thru, til graduation
accepted that they had stayed through.
This was the way things were.
The priest held their responses
over their young heads, as if he owned them.
Midnight hernia exams, pressing through
the rolled sheets, thyroid massages
on their soft neck, their heads
bent over his lap for spankings
while he sweated.
The boys later described their faces as
Hot and red, being shoved face-down
into his lap.
as he prayed for them.
It was hard to know which was worse,
For my brother, if anything,
going though it or refusing to help
those he could have.