I Love You Like a Mother: For Nuyorico

You, in your deep Brooklyn accent, your Bronx swagger, Jersey sway.

你，带着浓重的布鲁克林口音，带着布朗克斯式的招摇，泽西式的摇摆。

I love you like a mother— you, wearing headphones dancing in your living room to house, freestyle, a little Hector Lavoe, cuatros careening playfully alongside Puerto Rican accordions, Rafael Hernandez, Godfather to us all.

我像母亲一样爱你——戴着耳机在客厅里跳舞的你，即兴表演，有点 Hector Lavoe，cuatros 与波多黎各手风琴一起嬉戏地倾斜，Rafael Hernandez，我们所有人的教父。

I love you like a mother, bomba y plena, feet conversing with drums, circling the universe in a shimmy.

我爱你就像一位母亲，轰轰烈烈，双脚与鼓交谈，在摇摆中环绕宇宙。

I love you, the way you dream up fincas, a farm where you retire, smelling like sofrito stirred into arroz con gandules.

我爱你，就像你梦想中的 fincas 一样，这是一个你退休的农场，闻起来就像拌入 Arroz con gandules 的 sofrito。

Did I birth you?

我生了你吗？

Because I love you like Mami loves the reina in me.

因为我爱你，就像妈妈爱我体内的女王一样。

You— unbreakable caldero with a little garlic and onion sizzling in the steel center.

你——牢不可破的火山口，里面有一点大蒜和洋葱，在钢制中心发出嘶嘶声。

I love you like I love tender pernil—no like crispy cuero, the best part of the pork that crunches under our teeth melting on our tongues.

我爱你就像我爱嫩pernil一样——不像脆皮cuero，猪肉中最好的部分在我们的牙齿下嘎吱作响，在我们的舌头上融化。

I love us in all our cool sticky sweetness, piragua sold at a cart in Humboldt Park, my uncle pouring a little tamarindo syrup over shaved ice.

我爱我们所有凉爽粘稠的甜味，在洪堡公园的推车上出售的皮拉瓜，我叔叔在刨冰上倒了一点罗望子糖浆。

And your smile.

还有你的微笑。

I love your smile, like how a mother gazes upon her daughter proud of the bandera that flies in between her hands proud we smell salty, ocean water drenching our curly hair with a little bit of side eye.

我喜欢你的微笑，就像一位母亲凝视着她的女儿，为她双手间飞扬的班德拉自豪，自豪我们闻到咸味，海水用一点侧眼浸湿我们的卷发。

I love you.

我爱你。

The way I love the humid green of El Yunque, rainforest water bathing our bodies in Borinquen.

我喜欢 El Yunque 潮湿的绿色，Borinquen 的雨林水沐浴着我们的身体。

I love your city green too, pots sitting on your NYC balcony, sun shining down, rising deep green stretching its way up.

我也喜欢你的城市绿色，纽约阳台上的盆栽，阳光照耀着，升起的深绿色一直延伸到上面。

I love you even when your English is not very good looking.

我爱你，即使你的英语不太好看。

I love us, colonized children searching for libertad— pa’lante, siempre pa’lante.

我爱我们，追寻自由的殖民地儿童——pa'lante, siempre pa'lante。

Sometimes humans, always second class citizens searching for gold-paved American roads.

有时，人类总是二等公民，寻找黄金铺成的美国道路。

I love us: jíbaros and mancha de plátano.

我爱我们：jíbaros 和 mancha de plátano。

Jíbaro does not mean dumb and when you see the pava trust it means we are muy orgulloso demanding, insisting respect.

Jíbaro 并不意味着愚蠢，当你看到 pava 信任时，这意味着我们要求严格，坚持尊重。

We are the men who migrated to the mainland looking for work.

我们是移民到大陆寻找工作的男人。

We are single mothers practicing magic in cramped apartments.

我们是在狭窄的公寓里练习魔法的单身母亲。

We are the children who watch our abuelas at the stove, writing down measurements as oil flies from the frying pan.

我们是那些在炉子旁看着我们的阿布埃拉的孩子，当油从煎锅中飞溅时记下测量值。

We are the gardeners who grow hibiscus in backyards watching hummingbirds flit past.

我们是在后院种植芙蓉花的园丁，看着蜂鸟飞过。

All of us searching for Puerto Rico’s sweet nectar.

我们所有人都在寻找波多黎各的甜蜜花蜜。

I love us, head bent before an altar, pictures of tías and tíos in small frames, lit candles for the living and the dead, singed palo santo smoking the air.

我爱我们，在祭坛前低下头，小相框中装着蒂亚斯和蒂奥斯的照片，为生者和死者点燃蜡烛，烧焦的帕洛桑托在空气中冒着烟。

I love us even as our bodies double, one an island, the other the States, both embracing culture birthed from decades of worship and memory passed down mouth to mouth, all of us bonded by ancestral lineage something that sounds like singing in the air

我爱我们，即使我们的身体有双重，一个是岛屿，另一个是美国，两者都拥抱着几十年的崇拜和口口相传的记忆中诞生的文化，我们所有人都通过祖先血统联系在一起，这听起来就像在空中歌唱

or wait— it sounds a little more like barbed wire: resistance.

或者等等——这听起来更像是铁丝网：阻力。

Ysabel Y.

伊莎贝尔·Y.

González , a Newark, New Jersey native, is producer for poetry and social impact at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and curates the Dodge Poetry Festival.

冈萨雷斯是新泽西州纽瓦克人，是新泽西表演艺术中心诗歌和社会影响力的制作人，并策划道奇诗歌节。

She is a CantoMundo fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and the author of Wild Invocations and Sing This Body Out .

她是 CantoMundo 会员、手推车奖提名者，也是《狂野的召唤》和《唱出这个身体》的作者。

This poem was selected by September poetry curator Leslie McIntosh, who writes: “González’s ‘I Love You Like a Mother: For Nuyorico’ closes this folio out of the folds of elegies from lost pasts into an ode for the ‘magic of cramped apartments’ and ‘pots sitting on your NYC balcony’ of a blessed now.

这首诗被九月诗歌策展人莱斯利·麦金托什选中，他写道：“冈萨雷斯的《我像母亲一样爱你：献给努约里科》将这本对开本从失落的过去的挽歌中收尾，变成一首颂歌，颂扬“狭窄公寓的魔力”和“纽约阳台上的盆栽”的幸福现在。

How the specificity of event and artifact elevated the poem’s deep attention from refrain—’I love…’—to prayer.

事件和文物的特殊性如何将这首诗的深度关注从克制“我爱……”提升到祈祷。

What do we summon by naming our love so clearly while it yet exists in this world?

当我们的爱还存在于这个世界上时，我们通过如此清晰地命名我们的爱来召唤什么呢？

The similes of this poem tell us: sanctuary—the baby cousin of home.

这首诗的比喻告诉我们：庇护所——家的小表弟。

We can be mothers to our own oases of return—the gift of diaspora.

我们可以成为自己回归绿洲的母亲——侨民的礼物。

The linkages ‘bonded by ancestral lineage’ are alive in the here and now, whether on American or Puerto Rican soil, except in the final line of the poem.

无论是在美国还是波多黎各的土地上，除了这首诗的最后一行，这种“由祖先血统联系在一起”的联系在此时此地仍然存在。

There, we’re offered one of the few unambiguous metaphors of the poem.

在那里，我们看到了这首诗中为数不多的明确隐喻之一。

Something so grand and simple, it reaches beyond what can be said.”

如此伟大而简单的事情，超出了我们所能描述的范围。”