La (Mal)inche
The Phoenician alphabet rides waves
on the backs of the dispossessed,
the engraved and etched,
the plumas and pen markings
from birds and muscle memories
of braids weaving oral histories
as wide as the Chicxulub crater—
the Florentine Codex awaits us.
Bernadino de Sahagún’s great grandson
fifty times over still squirrels away
a monolingual rendition of Las Américas
where his codex has been renamed
yet coded into caravel(a)s, sailing
ships gliding on cosmic photon winds.
They called her La Malinche,
so I call myself the treacherous
translator, Tenepal, creator
of malware that tastes of las
llamas, flames the Inquisition
could never put out;
las llamas del altiplano,
las llamadas de mi pueblo.
The highland llamas,
the calls of my town,
boarding documents
I forged with a name
that only returns on
el Día de los Muertos.
Her blood runs through my veins, too.
I cannot soportar, tolerate
the diction of one lengua.
My language requires a flotilla
for safe crossing.
I will ride on past the Antilles,
the farthest shores of the Galápagos,
into the stellar firmament where
stray particles become ones and zeros
and the hacker Malinche once was
turns a dark canvas into a symphony
of Aztec boys and girls singing
corridos in bad mother tongues.
I vowed to be your Malinche,
malware in the system,
mother of many. They called
my offspring Mestizo, and so
I say their names in Spanglish,
tell them bedtime stories when
caravels foretold la Conquista,
an Age of Discovery.
La (Mal)inche foretells
other hypocrisies, little lies,
la mano de obra, la mano del colonizador,
sips of wine from barrels wrought with
la mano de la mujer, Spanish hands.
Who ever said Malinche was only woman,
only mortal, a ghost in the machine of syntax
we speak? Let her distill herself into morphemes
that leak softly from spaceborne vessels.
Let her roam por el ligero corriente del tiempo,
across the swift currents of time
into multilingual horizons.
Radon Journal, Issue 6 January 2024
(Multi)lingual.io
Four generations too late,
they became giddy children
clucking along with pollito, chicken,
cohete, rocket, estrella, star,
un abecedario, an alphabet of translations.
They recovered a language from audio files,
feeling for tendrils of morphemes and vowel sounds,
relishing in tongue twisters, exercising unused muscles.
Four generations too late,
they had to make sense of how thick hair
and brown eyes came from somewhere,
how they themselves were already inhabiting el más allá.
They savored the new horizons ancestors spoke for them,
holding back tears when they started
rolling their rr’s and doubling ll’s.
Four generations too late,
but right on time for a (Multi)Lingual.io
revival of las lenguas antiguas,
la langue et la parole, a metalinguagem do português,
Nahuatl and Quechua catching a ride on their names.
Mistakes were made aplenty, awash in stardust,
slippages and translanguaging rocking, but never
shaking the foundation of their capacious syntax.
The Sprawl Mag, Issue 2.1 February 2024
Rewilding the Axolotl
Some of the smallest survivors of
the Mexica civilization live underwater,
bobbing along Lake Xochimilco
like before the conquest;
hear their stories float
with little bubbles,
all-knowing smiles wise
with generations of treacherous secrets.
When the lakes became congested
with processions, algae strewn like
fallen papel picado and trash,
the axolotls domesticated themselves,
breathing air in unison for the first time.
They complained about their living conditions,
thus convincing humans to shelter these
forever young amphibians,
tickled pink with their charm.
Lab-grown rambunctious amphibians vied
for a prime spot in the ISS student experiments,
crawling aboard among plant seeds and cardboard
cutout solar panels. These almost stowaways made
it to the Lunar Gateway, then on to Mars
where they would dive and dine
in waters melted from frozen rocks.
The rewilded axolotls were known
to climb out of the water to watch
rocket launches, never desiring to
go further than their one perfect pond
on the Martian surface.
Star*Line Vol. 47, No. 2, April 2024
Somos la cara de la luna (We Are the Face of the Moon)
Somos la cara de la luna, brillando a lo largo de los siglos –
we are the face of the moon, shining through the centuries,
heartbeats lapping at eternity as our descendants
wear our faces, just as we wear those
of our antepasados, our ancestors.
We are gentle with our legacy, el collar de recuerdos,
our necklace of memories, for the little moments
span meters instead of lightyears, uniéndonos como si
fuéramos perlas cósmicas, joining us
as if we were cosmic pearls.
So often we doubt ourselves, dudándonos,
wrapping paltry gifts for when we are no more,
regalitos para iluminar nuevas lunas,
para brindar sabiduría a los ya sabios,
gifts to illuminate new moons,
to bring wisdom to the already wise.
How could we know more of life than those
who have bathed in founts of our memories,
las sirenas de los mares de tiempo,
sirens of the seas of time?
We can no longer walk with you, only appearing
on el Día de los muertos,
peering through smoke and ashes after
shuttling across entire systems
for the Day of the Dead, cohabitating with you for whole lunar
cycles as we gleam up at you, accepting your ofrendas,
offerings of the food and drink of old;
your twenty-third century cempasúchil marigold flowers
are laurels for all the bygone poets.
Somos la cara de la luna, aspirándonos a ser inmortales,
pero no llegamos a serlo por nuestra ternura y amor,
los verdaderos rastros de antaño.
We are the face of the moon, aspiring to be immortal,
yet never achieving it for our tenderness and love,
the true traces of yesteryear.
I send these words upstream to skies higher than mine
and faces youthful in countenance yet aged by eons
– por todo lo que hemos dejado al partir de
este plano de existencia –
by all we left while departing from
this plane of existence.
Frontera Lit Mag, vol.4, Spring 2024
Author Biography:
Dr. Angela Acosta (she/ella) is a bilingual Mexican American poet and Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of South Carolina. Her creative and academic work center on imagining possible worlds and preserving the cultural legacies of women writers. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and she received the 2023 Creating Writing Award from Feministas Unidas. Her poetry has appeared in Pluma, Apparition Lit, Lucky Jefferson, and Space & Time. She is author of the speculative poetry collection A Belief in Cosmic Dailiness (Red Ogre Review, 2023) and chapbook Fourth Generation Chicana Unicorn (Dancing Girl Press, 2024). She has published on autobiographies and poetry by Spanish women writers in Persona Studies, Ámbitos Feministas, and Feminist Modernist Studies. She is co-editor with Rebecca Haidt of the Fall 2024 (vol. 7, issue 3) Spanish Sapphic Modernity special issue of Feminist Modernist Studies.
Interview
Your collection Summoning Space Travelers is deeply concerned with both the speculative and the historical. In poems like “Regarding the Memory of Earth” and “Anthropocene Children of Holocene Parents,” you grapple with time, extinction, and planetary legacy. How do you see poetry functioning as a speculative archive, preserving both imagined and forgotten histories?
Much of the work of speculative poets is to transpose present and past histories and cultural practices onto future worlds on and off Earth. Summoning Space Travelers is a philosophical collection of speculative poetry that carries the many messages that humans might want to send to future spacefaring human societies. I designed the collection in three parts: “Terran Born” begins with the perspectives of the legacies we leave on Earth in the age of the Anthropocene, “Outward, We Sojourn” sends stories and ancestral lessons beyond Earth, and “Summoning Space Travelers” envisions the challenges and marvels of life and death among the stars. Poems like “Regarding the Memory of Earth” speculate as to how this cultural and historical archive will make its way through the generations and in what ways future generations will honor the traditions and rituals that we hold dear. This is especially important for marginalized peoples and cultures for whom traditional archives are not reliable repositories of knowledge for future generations.
How do you take up these themes in relation to Latinx culture in your bilingual collection A Belief in Cosmic Dailiness?
My second speculative poetry A Belief in Cosmic Dailiness (Red Ogre Review, 2023) collection envisions the experience of finding one’s place in a cosmos populated with a diverse array of Latinx, Spanish, and Latin American cultures. The poems are less philosophical and cozier in nature, like the experience of sitting in front of a campfire listening to sci-fi folk music (filk) with a variety of species. As a fourth generation Mexican American, I have been drawn to reading and writing poems and short stories that seek to creatively place people of many different heritages, Latinx and otherwise, in spaceships, planets, and terrestrial locales where they carry out daily rituals not too different than those that are practiced today. I’m grateful for poets I have met through the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association and speculative journals like Radon Journal, The Sprawl Mag, and Heartlines Spec for showing me what is possible for multilingual marginalized writers, their characters, and their words.
“Tamales on Mars” beautifully blends cultural memory with speculative futures, imagining traditional recipes thriving in extraterrestrial settings. How do you approach the role of food and ancestral knowledge in speculative writing? Do you see these elements as acts of resistance against homogenized, colonial visions of space travel?
I really didn’t think that food would become so central to my speculative poetry, and I’m humbled by the positive reviews I’ve received of “Tamales on Mars.” Since I didn’t grow up exposed to many aspects of Latin American culture, tamales hold a special place in my heart for being the one recipe that was passed down from the Mexican side of my family. While writing the poem, I was drawn to the idea of cultivating ingredients on Mars and raising happy, hopping goats who will supply cheese to the Martian community. Food and recipes have preserved cultural practices generations over for exiled, enslaved, and diasporic peoples, and it’s crucial that we bring these foods and recipes aboard spaceships to move away from visions, both real and fictional, of white, American food as the only portrayal of sustenance away from Earth. Nanobah Becker’s Diné science fiction short film “Sixth World” is a wonderful example of how cultures are responding to the colonization and cultivation of food in space. I hope humans will soon develop new recipes inspired by cultural traditions on the International Space Station and beyond.
Speculative poetry often serves as a mode of reimagining reality. How do you integrate speculative elements into your teaching practice?
While I haven’t taught much speculative writing in my Spanish literature classes, I think that having students reflect on the future is something that finds its way into any course that I teach. In Spanish language classes, I often ask students to tell me about their future hopes and dreams (with the subjunctive tense, of course) and in Spanish culture classes we think critically about Spanish culture and society and how things are developing in the twenty-first century.
Your work as a poet plays with time, language, and alternate possibilities. Do you encourage your students to engage in similar speculative exercises in the classroom? If so, how?
As a professor, I try to tap into students’ hopes and plans for their own future and that of their generation. The few times I’ve taught speculative short stories in Hispanic literature classes, I’ve really enjoyed doing activities with students where they think about how one small change in contemporary society could change things significantly in the future. One exercise I particularly enjoy is to ask students to put together a time capsule of the present and future of literature. They find images and words that envision how people might create and interact with print and digital content within the next 20 and 50 years. Then, I ask students to reflect on how people might understand today’s writing and technology and what alternate political, social, cultural, and environmental possibilities might exist for them in the future.
Do you see a connection between speculative poetry and decolonial or feminist pedagogies? How does your teaching philosophy reflect these intersections?
Absolutely, speculative poetry certainly has the capacity to challenge Western systems of knowledge productions and the coloniality of power. Though not inherent to speculative poetry as a genre, I have found a home in speculative poetry for the way that poets can share decolonial and feminist praxis with others. As I develop my courses, I’m cognizant of how colonization and empire have shaped the Spanish-speaking world and want the texts and authors I select for my course to reflect those currents of power and how writers have “written back” to the metropole. As someone who often teaches courses on Spain, I want students to become familiar with how Franco rose to power and how LGBTQ+ people and women survived and found solidarity during and after the Franco dictatorship. We discuss state institutions as well as acts of subversion, rebellion, and alternate audiovisual archives of twentieth century Spain. I’m looking forward to delving more into contemporary Spanish science fiction in a course I’m developing on dystopias and utopias.
Your poetry also often explores bilingualism and interwoven identities. Do you find that speculative approaches help students navigate and express complex cultural and linguistic experiences in their own writing?
Since many of my students are second language learners of Spanish, they are often eager to speak about their own language learning experience. We read and listen to Elizabeth Acevedo’s bilingual spoken word poetry and reflect on the multilayered experience of how she articulates her identity as an Afro-Latina and how students align their identities with the languages we speak. By the time students are reading Spanish literature, they have the metalinguistic awareness to notice how writers from different regions and time periods use Spanish to express their cultural pride, discontent, and their philosophical questions about the universe.
In what ways do you think speculative poetry can serve as an anti-apocalyptic tool in the classroom—offering new ways of envisioning the future amidst political, ecological, and social crises?
The beauty of speculative poetry is that you can change a single aspect of everyday life and create a new, parallel universe in the span of just a stanza. While I haven’t yet taught speculative poetry in the classroom, I have taught “La niña sin alas” (“The Girl Without Wings”), a short story by Paloma Díaz-Mas, in which she creates a world of winged people (taking up the myth of Icarus) and envisions how those people treat women and disabled individuals. As many have said, worlds are always ending, and speculative poetry and fiction can create new frameworks and solutions for the crises and strife facing societies around the world today. Though the worldbuilding and technology within those stories may be new, speculative possibilities can assuage solastalgia and help student think critically about complex challenges and crises.
To cite this post:
Acosta, Ángela. “Angela Acosta’s Speculative Poetry.” Cronoscopia, https://cronoscopia.com/2025/03/11/angela-acostas-speculative-poetry/.
Angela Acosta’s Speculative Poetry:
