Blog Post Draft:
Between Tongues: Revisiting My Accent Poem

Denice Frohman’s poem Accents inspired me to write about my own experience growing up as an international kid who never felt like I fully belonged. I wasn’t “white enough,” but I also wasn’t “Spanish enough.” My accent, my identity, and my story lived in-between. Revisiting this poem now, I wanted to reshape it to reflect not just the struggle of fitting in, but the pride of existing between worlds.

In this new version, I wanted to honor both sides of my identity. Instead of seeing the “in-between” as a lack, I reframed it as a bridge — a place where survival, creativity, and connection live. The poem now celebrates the rhythm of being multilingual, multicultural, and unapologetically complex.

“My accent is a border
that never learned to stay still.
It bends, it breaks,
it stitches itself into whatever room I enter.

Too white for the Spanish kids,
too Spanish for the white ones —
I learned to carry silence like a passport,
flashing it when I needed entry.

But silence is heavy.
So I let my tongue dance —
between English and Spanish,
between survival and longing,
between who I was told to be
and who I am becoming.

My words are not broken.
They are bridges.
Each syllable a step across oceans,
each mispronunciation is a reminder
that I belong everywhere,
and nowhere,
and still — I belong.”