Tamales on Mars​

by Angela Acosta

The dry dirt of Mars could be
the deserts of Chihuahua,
Bolivian salt flats
or the frigid Patagonian steppe.

Here, my bisabuela’s recipes
can find new homes
with ingredients harvested
and cooked underground.

Pottery wheels hum in time
with the wind, birthing
new cooking vessels
with gritty, red stoneware.

We make tamales on Sundays,
filling them with the sweets
of dried fruits left in the sun
and cheeses from goats happily
jumping in Martian gravity.

The taste compares to terran delights.
We eat tamales and protein rich beans
around a roaring fire where colonists
tell stories of skies of blue
and arid deserts like these.

Angela Acosta is a bilingual Latina poet and scholar from Florida with a passion for the distant future and possible now. She won the 2015 Rhina P. Espaillat Award from West Chester University for her Spanish poem “El espejo.” Her science fiction poetry has or will appear in in On Spec, Penumbric, MacroMicroCosm, Radon, and Eye to the Telescope. She is currently completing her Ph.D. in Iberian Studies at The Ohio State University and resides in Columbus, Ohio.