Ana María Caballero delivers a multifaceted rendition of self in the performative poem Waiting Room. Tying into her own strong spoken-word history and poetry’s tradition of orality, Caballero performs her verse on screen, using her own body to speak the language of the poem, exploring how her physicality ties to her verse in this form for the first time. Her text’s narrative twists with the vicissitudes of caretaking.
The intersecting Spanish, translating to “You, Me, Ours”, is a play on words that shifts the speaker’s intent. The formal division in Waiting Room prompts us to question the permeable boundaries between caring for ourselves and caring for others.
Waiting Room is from Caballero’s prize-winning book Mammal.
Photography by Luis Gaspar.
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Waiting Room
Twenty-six weeks ago, you entered my belly as an invisible coin. Now I bump into walls with your bulge, spill soup on you, prop my elbows across your arched loins. Nina, our space is this— this one evening as minute in a moonlit room. I invite you to take over as you do, exhaust me as you do. Fourteen more weeks, child, to crowd my organs flat, to know absolute privacy, to witness the secret of my swollen eye, to collect my voice with the web of your hands. tú, yo, tuyo Only once will I allow you to see this, Nina— this one collapse by the cage of your crib. Is my shaking waking you? Don’t think it common: it is just the waiting that does this. Not for you— no. I wait for me. For the mother in me to take care of me. To birth me and bathe me and put me to sleep, here, in your room—where the moon primes my womb, so I may rise to receive you, reliable as a worn wooden spoon.