Poem by Angela Acosta
May 15, 2023
The Hope You Left Me
I spent the better half of a dissertation chapter grappling with the fact that the future women wrote about, clamored for, and glimpsed in quiet moments gathered for companionship has not yet arrived some hundred years later. Perhaps I am too optimistic when I write about Spanish and Latin American women, these poetisas, modernas, sinsombreristas, poets, modern women, the ones who took their hats off a world and two generations away. When I traveled across an ocean to visit Castilian and Andalusian landscapes that populated their diaries and minds, I remember the sting of unfulfilled dreams, marriages, exile, and misattributions. They have taught me what it is like to be young, flying on an airplane with its frisson of possibility. They have held me in the grief of missed opportunities and the fears of being female. They have told me in many ways and dialects that we may not have reached liberation, may not be fully able to live as we wish, but we are not alone in this anguish for we gain new companions in each found manuscript.
About Angela Acosta
Angela Acosta (she/her) is a bilingual Latina poet who holds a Ph.D. in Iberian Studies from The Ohio State University. She is author of Summoning Space Travelers (Hiraeth Publishing, 2022) and Fourth Generation Chicana Unicorn (Dancing Girl Press, 2023).