Lo siento, nameling. I never sing your name that can’t untie itself from fathers’ shadow. Love
your father never was, void of tender hands and tongue. I once thought him a blood-saint,
made him the muse of my poems until I learned how he longbruised your past. Valentine who
held me twice—more often and softer than he held you. I once prayed he’d accept me when I
die, then realized I replaced his name with god’s. Why are we born to kneel for men? Is this
why your firstborn was a girl, to break the cycle of fathereign?

Lo siento, Valentín. I rarely speak your tongue I first broke with my childlips. Still, you taught
me to pluck garbanzos from their magiascaras, asked me if I was happy. I wonder how your
childself would respond if asked the same. Protector your mother and her mother never were,
mooning husbands’ irameters. Desenciegame from our ancestry of momplacency. Let me
follow your footsteps in abonamando our bloodtree.

Lo siento, abuelo. I write your life more often than I share it. Poems I gatekeep out of fear that
these pages will wound deeper than the history that made them. Even so, you grant me your
santipaternidad with each tale: how you videotaped each of your hijos’ milestones because
your parents didn’t celebrate them; how you gift money to every nieto because your
grandparents wouldn’t spare a dish to feed you; how you still embrace your youngest child
despite his shadowanger because you know what it’s like to be seen as blamebody instead of
son; how you give too much even now because no one asked more of you than your hands to
work and body to sting when you were a child.

Lo siento, Tito.

I don’t sing your not-name enough.