In the old days, voices connected by wire
Now waves carry them unbounded
To our palms, no strings attached
Floating just like our lives
In a limbo of our doing.

I think of seagulls’ long calls
Waiting for the sun to warm
Tail and wing to fly away
In the morning.
You recognize the behavior.

I picture you as a tolling bell
Calling the faithful to Mass
More than the muezzin of youth
Forgotten so effortlessly.
Move away, watch structures crumble

Under foreign pressures,
Non halal food, reshaped ideology,
Those openly inviting women
Exactly like open face sandwiches
At Grenouille’s near the Sacré-Coeur.

Yesterday I visited your mother
Old now, opaque film interferes
With her field of vision, a common experience.
My heart flares up like fireworks knowing
I may be the one weeping when she dies.

I won’t join you in Paris,
You’ll never return to our blue beaches,
The Madrassa, Ibrahim’s workshops.
Nor walk by fruit stalls showing their colors,
The one thing you have not shown me.

Growing up in Valencia, Spain, light, color and the sea were the constant surroundings in Alicia Viguer-Espert’s life. Raised in a bilingual household, shebegan writing in English in 2017 and was the winner of the 2017 San Gabriel Valley Poetry Festival Book Contest with her book Holding a Hummingbird. As a featured poet, she has read her poems at numerous venues within the greater LA. Her work has been published in Colorado Boulevard, Lummox Anthologies, Altadena Poetry Review, ZZyZx Intersections, and Spectrum Publications, among others. She’s a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee.