Alejandro Lemus-Gomez

Mi Madre at the Morning Market

BIO

Finding home in Miami, Florida and rural North Georgia, Alejandro Lemus-Gomez is a Cuban-American poet and Davies-Jackson Scholar at the University of Cambridge. His written works are forthcoming or have appeared in Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, The Journal, The Afro-Hispanic Review, storySouth, The Indiana Review Online, and other journals. A former Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets fellow, he was a semi-finalist for the 2021 Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Poetry Prize, and finalist for the 2020 C.D. Wright Emerging Poet's Prize. 

Twitter: @Alejandrolemgom

 

Her blue Snoopy coffee mug alongside
her Spanish version of Chaucer. Vanilla
cream in coffee. Bread with mantequilla
.
English Decameron, she says beside
me, at the market where we sell joyas
the color of turquoise Varadero.
WASPs walk by. Tight lips. Touching jewels like crows,
rudely moving stones like a game of chess.
Mom and I speak, and they ask,
Where you from?
No, really from. I heard you talk to her.
Mama answers Habana. They murmur,
I’ve heard of that place. They leave, no income
today. Their money no vale, Mom says,
dale, in this booth, we set the prices.

© The Acentos Review 2021