Poesia: Naturalization Day

By Luis Roca



It doesn’t matter where you are, the sun will set in the West
You may be sitting in a dinner or in a cantina,
Dora may explore how to teach Spanish to your kids,
Margaret may be the red-haired mannequin who decides your visa
Dreams, desires, fears and spontaneity may be written in a thousand languages
And you should be ready to be more than just a rug named Flag

You remember using it as a river towel, also as your rival fighting gloves, but today it is your welcoming flag,
But to know if it is a vacation, look out the window first and see if you are in Guantanamo or in Key West
Steps are all over the road; you just need to read the sand-script language.
Assimilation is much easier after 69 miles of pleasures with blonds and morenas in a cantina,
And at the end it doesn’t matter if you went through barbed wire or first-class seats to get your visas
Your son is happy that’s all what matters and you know those who don’t lie are kids

Empty-heads call them anchor babies, but for you they are the fruit of life, your kids
And life wraps around in changing colors and forms that some call flags
And higher decisions can determine the outcome, but not your freedom, but at the end of the day yes, it’s an American visa
And those simplicities make all the differences when you look to the West
Because even though you can fix the world in a cantina
You need to follow the policies, fit in the system and drive under the same language

So you take your Indian-American girlfriend to watch an Argentinean film and get lost in translation, saliva and language,
So your son says to you “I love Taco Bell” and you know he is being him, truthful, a kid,
So you say fuck all the politically correctly incoherence and head back to the cantina
So you speed all the way in your El Camino listening to rap music avoiding being flagged
By the police. So you rely on your GPS and forget there are any real frontiers or directions others than East or West.
And you forget your status quo and get ready to blow up your Master Card and Visa

But rather abruptly, you remember there is something call lottery of visas
And you find yourself breaking the wall of language
And the East starts to look as attractive as the West
And you, somehow realize that all this is for you and not only for your kids
And then you see that a bunch of colors and strips can be more than just a flag
So you start calling bar your old cantina

And you decide to drink Bud instead of Corona even if you have to switch cantinas
As the white red-haired lady reads your name, and today is not only a visa
It is the full citizenship that comes with a small flag
That weights pounds, kilos and more than what any language
Can measure, and you feel like a kid
Free inside the order, but still the same looking to the West.

So you head West in your El Camino to La Cantina for the last time, but you take your kids, your new flag and your old one and then you tell them in two different languages the whole story of the visa and the dream.