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.