Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1989
No one asks
where I am from,
I must be
from the country of janitors,
I have always mopped this floor.
Honduras, you are a squatter's camp
outside the city
of their understanding.
No one can speak
my name,
I host the fiesta
of the bathroom,
stirring the toilet
like a punchbowl.
The Spanish music of my name
is lost
when the guests complain
about toilet paper.
What they say
must be true:
I am smart,
but I have a bad attitude.
No one knows
that I quit tonight,
maybe the mop
will push on without me,
sniffing along the floor
like a crazy squid
with stringy gray tentacles.
They will call it Jorge.
Martin Espada is a poet and English professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His eighth collection of poems, The Republic of Poetry, was published last October. This poem comes from the collection Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hands.
