How to Celebrate

Issue 39 • Spring 2019 • Nonfiction

I.

It’s your birthday—five years old, hoorah—and your mother’s arrived from la panaderia with a tres leches cake. Large, rectangular, white, inscribed in red-syrup frosting it reads: Feliz Cumpleaños. Mother’s laid the cake on the dining table. A match is pulled, dragged onto the striking surface, to release a hush of fire illuminating her tan skin. Look around the living room. It isn’t your living room. Your mother’s brother has allowed your family time to settle before you find a home after moving from the Pacific Northwest. Look back—there’s a room behind you in the dining room where you’ll get locked in a few months from now, a restroom in the kitchen, a rabbit in the basement, a room upstairs with a blue light bulb. Notice how subtle and resentful doors open; peeping eyes of your cousins open and close, unwilling to gather for a slice of cake. Blow the candle, blow it. 

II

Rounder in the face, you fill your mouth with mother’s homemade mole, frijoles, and arroz—a Mexican American fiesta. Eleven doesn’t feel like a year of celebration, but it does by having your second period in your lifetime and your breasts have begun to itch (when you ask your mother about itchy breasts, weeks later, she’ll tell you it means that they’re growing and you’ll nod, nod again when you examine your brown areolas in the restroom). Family your mother’s invited—second cousins, first aunts and uncles, an elderly man who is related to your grandfather, babies sound asleep in their Graco carriers—arrive as if they’re attending a baptism. 

In the basement, your cousins cheer, ¡Salud! ¡Salud! in the kid’s table, and you tell yourself ten years from now you’ll be 21. Extravagant styrofoam cups, and wine glasses snatched from upstairs, are filled and refilled with Jarritos tamarind soda (100% azúcar as advertised). When all the food and drinks have been consumed, take a few laps in the basement for a game of “tag” before realizing a sudden itch on your back. Let it pass and continue despite the back-laden pulse, heat and throb, of your mind dismissing your body, body dismissing your mind. 

III.

While waiting to be attended in the ER, remember you were there ten years ago for shingles—a viral infection, caused by the reactivation of the varicella zoster virus (chickenpox), with skin rashes along with blisters wrapped on your upper-back sliding to the side of your right breast. It had taken you three hours to get treated, and you sat with your mother waiting and waiting. And, then a doctor had shaken your hand, apologizing for the inattentive care from staff, asking in a sympathetic demeanor, How are you? 

IV.

Now, as you hold a mauve tray for your saliva to drop and accumulate, bubbles rising and plopping to their own microcosm pool, you wait to get treated for something. Pneumonia? (No.) Bronchitis? (No.) Tonsillitis? (Maybe?) Get told you’re a difficult patient, while gagging as the PA positions a large popsicle stick on your tongue, pressing it down and sliding it back your throat. Receive a shot to calm your nerves and get prescribed useless medicine. Take time off school, reflect, read César Chávez interviews and Pablo Neruda’s The Book of Questions; recite poem “XXXI” first in English, second in Spanish: 

Whom can I ask what I came                            A quien le puedo preguntar

to make happen in this world?                          qué vine a hacer en este mundo?

Why do I move without wanting to?                 Porqué me muevo sin querer?

Why am I not able to sit still?                             Porqué no puedo estar inmóvil?

Why do I go rolling without wheels                  Porqué voy rodando sin ruedas

flying without wings or feathers,                       volando sin alas ni plumas,

and why did I decide to migrate                         y qué me dio por transmigrar

if my bones live in Chile?                                    si viven en Chile mis huesos? 

V.

When the day of your 22nd birthday comes, attempt to recollect birthdays you can’t remember, especially the teen years, while driving 5.8 miles to Whole Foods. Remind yourself you are in recovery of something and that is your pass if you can’t remember. Peregrinate aisles and sections of the store, though you know you can only afford their tofu, before heading to the bakery. Boston cream, carrot, and mousse cakes are embellished in display with the utmost toppings—glazed fruit, rainbow sprinkles, Ferrero Rocher-like chocolates—before meeting a cake you haven’t had in years: tres leches. No inscription needed; this one’s for youth. 

Issue 53 • Spring 2026

Fiction

Poetry

Fiction

Poetry