Cipota Under the Moon

Cipota Under the Moon, an exquisite fourth book by Claudia Castro Luna, derives its title from a Central American term for “little girl” and one of the author’s surnames, Luna, which US Immigration and Naturalization Services attempted to excise upon her arrival: “Here we use one last name, said the officer, and closed the matter with the gavel of his voice.” Castro Luna likens the temporary loss of that name, her moon, to “having a limb chopped off”:

For years I walked like that, cloven, until pen in hand, I began to weave into blank pages tamales de elote, scent of yerbabuena, spells of flor de muerto, the riot of a Tuesday market in Ahuachapán, the Nahuatl sageness of my abuela.

The sensory pleasures of home inspire the speaker to write, and she eventually reclaims her identity (“La Luna hung again in the firmament of my name”). 

In a range of prose poems and evocative lyrics that incorporate both translated and untranslated Spanish text, Castro Luna bridges the emotional and geographical distance between a childhood in El Salvador and an adulthood in the United States, while exploring a process of migration marked by violence, a sense of dislocation, and the experience of navigating between disparate worlds and languages. The mostly Spanish “Pura Vida” captures the effervescence of childhood, through a list of treats: “Mangos, naranjas, / guayabas, maracas, / ritmo, sabor, sweet nectar // piña para la niña! / jocote para el cipote!” And “On Translation” offers a perspective on “life” that is predicated on a refusal of borders that separate and keep people apart:

Vida, vida, vida
vida, vida, vida
vida, vida, vida
vida, vida, vida
vida, vida, vida
not walls 

Such inventive, multilingual lyrics, reveal a poet engaged in a transformative play with language, and with life. In “Visions of Gladness” the speaker’s deceased grandmother suggests exchanging an inherited tradition for a freer existence:

[…] become not the rosary
one bead in front of the other—

Girl, woman, wife, mother, widow—
become pomegranate seeds instead

Each jewel bursting forth from her own papery case
whirling in her own blood by her own light charged