Code Switches

Cómo se dice, my circuitry, sews me—me cose—
word by word & dictates—how do you say?
She translates, wires me, rewires rosary—Rosario
was my mom’s name, she tells me. Decades pray me
an aria con cuerdas—como Ariadne. My dark moles,

she says, are lunares. I think astronaut, a May moon
at perigee. There’s lightning in the Chinese?,
but I see lasso & chain link in the componentry,
an analemma tracing dagongmei & ensambladoras
from rural town to city factory. In my browser today,

feminists in China elude censors with rice
& bunny emoji for ‘mi’ ‘tu’ resistance. I hear the motorcycle
revving within Nana’s ándale but need to sound
out jíjole in my Anzaldúa so sound meets memory.

everyone
take gold
a mountain
look ship

Ng Ng’s postcard read when she came with Ai Gu
in 1948. A mountain inside our paper-name,
there’s gold in the pun. Great-grandfather—learning
my grandfather used papers for his daughter—
scolded, “More money in sons!” Nana, for my poem,

gave me her pliers—green handle, needle nose—
a finer pair of fingers to tweeze semiconductors—
wafer after wafer. Her niños—years later, my tías & tíos—
home from elementary, helped straighten the leads—
pulling pigtails of transistors, leaping code switches

& warming tortillas. Oír origins—an echo in the hecho.
Xicana Cherríe Moraga writes about her mother’s
“piecework”—how she sat nightly before the tv,
“wrapping copper wires into the backs of circuit boards.”
Braiding, I think, to parse & plait the wires that lit

the images she watched. I looked up in Cosmo
that knot work—French, Dutch, Fishtail, Braid-to-Bun,
Milkmaid & Halo—those chongos Nana made—
the yank & tugged-tie, the brushwork through
the dark hair of daughters that often sparked.