Accents by Denice Frohman
I’m Denice Frohman,
and this is “Accents.”
my mom holds her accent like a shotgun,
with two good hands.
her tongue, all brass knuckle
slipping in between her lips
her hips, are all laughter and wind clap.
she speaks a sanchocho
of spanish and english,
pushing up and against one another,
in rapid fire
there is no telling my mama to be “quiet,”
my mama don’t know “quiet.”
her voice is one size better fit all
and you best not tell her to hush,
she waited too many years for her
voice to arrive
to be told it needed house keeping.
English sits in her mouth remixed
so “strawberry” becomes “eh-strawbeddy”
and “cookie” becomes “eh-cookie”
and kitchen, key chain, and chicken
all sound the same.
my mama doesn’t say “yes”
she says, “ah ha”
and suddenly the sky in her mouth
becomes a Hector Lavoe song.
her tongue can’t lay itself
down flat enough
for the English language,
it got too much hip
too much bone
too much conga
too much cuatro
to two step
got too many piano keys
in between her teeth,
it got too much clave
too much hand clap
got too much salsa to sit still
it be an anxious child wanting to
make Play-Doh out of concrete
English be too neat for
her kind of wonderful.
her words spill in conversation
between women whose hands are all they got
sometimes our hands are all we got
and accents that remind us
that we are still
bomba, still plena
you say “wepa”
and a stranger becomes your hermano,
you say “dale”
and a crowd becomes a family reunion.
my mother’s tongue is a telegram
from her mother
decorated with the coqui’s of el campo
so even when her lips can barely
stretch themselves around english,
her accent is a stubborn compass
always pointing her
towards home.