“Alabanza: In Praise of Our Mothers, In Praise of Their Hands’’ by Gisselle Yepes

As we celebrate Latinx/Hispanic Heritage Month, we honor the diaspora’s rich contributions to, and profound influence on, arts and culture in the US and beyond. This four-part poetry series invites four Latinx poets to explore and respond to a work in MoMA’s collection.

“I chose this artwork because I am obsessed with hands and these hands washing (what becomes white clothing in this poem) reminded me of my mother’s hands,” says Gisselle Yepes of photographer Tina Modotti’s affective gelatin silver print. Yepes is a Puerto Rican and Colombian storyteller from the Bronx who explores themes of grief, memory, and silence within Puerto Rican families. For Yepes, Modotti’s photograph deeply resonates with these themes and with their writing practice: “In my debut manuscript, the word ‘hands’ appears 33 times. . .this obsession with hands is rooted in how intricate hands are, how intimate hands can be, in what they let us do for ourselves, for someone else, how our hands are so often the closest we get to taking care of each other.”

Yepes joins a number of esteemed poets who have contributed original poems to Magazine. We present “Alabanza: In Praise of Our Mothers, In Praise of Their Hands” in honor of Latinx/Hispanic Heritage Month, which is celebrated annually from September 15 to October 15.

Tina Modotti. Hands Washing. 1927

• • •

Praise her brown hands. Praise her working
hands close to my mother’s
and her mothers. Praise her hands washing
white clothes almost 100 years after
this photo is taken. Praise her brown hands
making light when creased. Praise her ring
withstanding the water like a mother
stands never mentioning her back.
Praise this photo’s first name. Praise
Labor 1. Praise naming a mother
what it takes to mother. Praise not
leaving a mother behind with just her hands
washing. Praise this act I’ve witnessed
in our kitchen sink, our bathtub, our
buckets. Praise Santurce. Praise Tremont.
Praise the Concourse. Praise Hoe Avenue.
Praise clotheslines. Praise our clothes flying
in the wind. Our flags for mothering.
Praise running when it begins to rain.
Praise our clothes spread over doors,
couches, radiators until they dry. Praise them
washed first then singing limp over the rail
guarding our windows. Praise Mami,
my mother’s knuckles remembered
back to me. Praise the blood we chafe
trying to take care of each other, trying to clean
each other’s mess. Praise her hands
calloused. Praise this photo, my god,
this photo. Praise this poem. This poem smells
like cloró said like that in a laundromat
in the Bronx listening to everybody’s business.
Praise the bleach it takes to cover a family.
The women here go faint often and this
is not a metaphor. Praise the bathroom
white con cloró y ajax. Praise the pine sol
y fabuloso haunting from another room. Praise
the mother like any good mother who forgets
to open the windows. Praise her labor.
Praise Mami being one of the oldest daughters
of ten children. Praise her mothering then too.
Praise her bathing her brothers’ backs like
a mother. Praise her scrubbing their clothes
once they were old enough to scrub themselves.
Praise these two hands, these working hands,
muscling fabric in 1927. Praise this worker
in Mexico. Praise Mexico. Praise the child
unseen—screaming. Praise knowing this to be
true because I’ve been a child too screaming.
Praise the story, how Mami tells it. Praise her
with a first born alive now to tell the story.
Praise her trust of boiling water to do away
with dirt. Praise biberones.
Praise water. Praise bubbles made
when trying to keep a family clean. Praise being
a single mother trying to put your child to sleep.
Praise cleaning the baby bottles without help.
Praise falling asleep too.
Praise the child I’ve been
screaming us awake
when my mother needed to rest
her hands. Praise both of us awake
to smoke. Praise the mother I’ve been
to keep my mother and I alive.
Praise my mother. Praise hers.

pa’ Grénma o Wela y Mami

• • •

Gisselle Yepes

Gisselle Yepes received their MFA in creative writing at Indiana University Bloomington and a BA from Wesleyan University. Yepes is a Letras Boricuas 2022 Fellowship Recipient, a Tin House Scholar, and a 2023 Sundress Academy of the Arts Resident. Their poetry has been featured in Split this Rock, Gulf Coast, Poets.org, and the anthology Sana Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions of Healing and Justice. Yepes’s creative nonfiction essay “On Her Waters Summoning Us to Drown” won december magazine’s 2022 Curt Johnson Prose Award in Creative Nonfiction, and their film Recordando a Wela was featured on GIPHY x Roku’s Public Axis channel.