A telenovela plays in the background Like rolling out film into sunlight The telenovela is from my mother’s time she says They were all so beautiful The actresses inside the low-quality screens & early 2000s makeup Low-rise denim I could never pull off But wish I could Wish I could keep my hair straight in the heat of Mexico where the Telenovela was filmed or at least in My country where all the movies are Foreign & terribly translated There are some local ones that are funny & meant to be with the same recurring actors I am my own recurrence Trying on a new thong in front of a mirror From 2012 that’s pink with its Back peeling or daydreaming about the detective on Television who no one seems to like But I do I watch American television until driven To exhaustion & I can’t get up the next Day to function as I should Still make my checklists & pull through them like getting through a bad film Where the actress falls & all the men are bimbos Are we still saying that Get on the stationary bike & ride off to nowhere & everywhere all at once Preferably Argentina because things sound better In an accent When you tell me that the world is ending
Asheley Nova Navarro
Asheley Nova Navarro is a Dominican poet and translator. She is the founding editor of Sontag Mag and a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal. Her poems and poems-in-translation are published or forthcoming in Waxwing, Revista Casapaís, and Revista Aguacero, amongst others. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
I wanted to explore the middle ground between my country’s culture and American culture, particularly in terms of beauty standards and routines. In what ways am I, as an immigrant, alienated from one as equally as I am from the other, and what does it mean to find myself not fully devoted to one cultural standard or another?
