A Descoberta
by Bridget Gage-Dixon

Great Aunt Rose rolled my cheeks

between her flabby fingers,

lapsed into a language I did not know,

Olá menina bonita

hung in the moist summer air undefined,

the words unwound in me,

exposed something exotic

curled into the helix of who I was.

 

Until then I’d been an Irish girl,

two generations removed from the emerald isle,

a soul constructed by the skirl of bagpipes,

the stories delivered on whiskey soaked

breaths of jovial uncles.

 

In Rose’s kitchen in Fall River,

I became a Sousa, ate paella, chorizo,

and caldo verde, as she sipped sangria,

fished fruit from her glass and laid it on my plate.

I listened to her stories as a blaze of brandy

washed across my tongue.

 

She spoke of Santa María,

fleshed out the bones of the grandfather

I’d forgotten. Ancestors from the Azores

rose like phantoms from her tongue,

their skin stained with dyer’s woad,

each tale a swathe of blue across

a girl, who’d, until then, seemed solely green.

 

BRIDGET GAGE-DIXON attempts daily to parent three teens of her own and teaches over a hundred others the value of literature in their digital-age lives. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, Inkwell, U.S. 1 Worksheets and Gargoyle as well as several others. She received her MFA from Stonecoast/USM. Bridget lives and teaches in central New Jersey.

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