Equivalents
Monica de la Torre
My child is my mother.
There is a perpetual tug of war
between the child in my mother
and the mother in my child.
My spouse is not father to my child.
The man who is lover to his mother –
he too is childless, having been
son to his grandfather, but not brother
to his mother, or son.
The self-evidence of terms
designating family ties
masks the entanglements.
Is it folklore, the assumption
that a man will choose a lover
over his children
and that a mother her children
over her lover?
In this, the man and I,
we are equivalent.
We each have our records.
About this poem
“I’ve been exploring the notion of translation equivalence for some time, having produced multiple English versions of a poem of mine in Spanish titled ‘Equivalencias’ through various translation methods. Becoming aware of Stieglitz’s Equivalents series of photographs and clouds – among the earliest to engage abstraction – prompted me to expand my project. For this poem, I tried to describe complex interpersonal dynamics using only the narrow vocabulary for the nuclear family.” – Monica de la Torre
About Monica de la Torre
Monica de la Torre’s new book “The Happy End/All Welcome” is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2016. She is a senior editor at BOMB Magazine.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2015 Monica de la Torre. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
