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.