ju5th0ught5

When I was 14 I wrote your name in black sharpie on my calf and told my mom it was a tattoo  A year later I got a real one, my own name across my chest.  I don’t need permanent ink to remember you, there is at least one moment every day I wring you out of me like sea water from my hair.  My tan skinned golden eyed virgin.  Men who were raised by women know how to love with a gentle…

How can I write about food and love as if they were not the same as if we were not both raised on secondhand expectations of obedience and omission as if it were a simple as the meal you have never cooked for me because you “don’t know how to.” You learned to be served and I learned to butter the burns from hot oil that decorate your Abuela’s hands and now mine. I chop jalapeños with a dull…

I don’t know how to be absolute. Sometimes I think about forever and what that might look like and you’re nowhere to be found. Maybe that’s because of a dish you left dirty in a clean sink, or the way you don’t even pretend to be listening, or maybe it’s just because the color of the sky makes me feel alone and comfortable in my loneliness. Maybe it’s the things I said, or the things you didn’t,…

Where are the poets to tell us we will be ok?

To write metaphors of spring and how all things pass.

Where are the poets with their beautiful words to transport us from this endless winter

if only for a moment to melt the ice that has formed around our hearts?

Where are the singers with their redemption songs

to drown out the rage?

To soften the lumps in our throats,

to hit…

when after too many

poems like obituaries

all start to sound the same

a black man, thirsty for justice, had bullets poured into his body

we hear that he didn’t comply

but we have seen the casualties of compliance

a white man, hungry for violence, walked calmly away from his kills with the same expression his father wore while walking away from his

bodies in the streets

blowing in the trees

sleeping in their beds

after a while they all rot

like the idea that poems like prayers

like life

she asks

Blonde Barbie in her brown eight year old hands

Did you hear him?

I am ashamed now for ignoring it

but I have been hearing that man and men like him since I was eight

and I wanted to finish my workout

so I pretended I didn’t hear

pretended I didn’t feel his eyes under my clothes and inside my skin.

Only now it is different because a boy and girl have seen me stay quiet against something ugly and scary

and I don’t want them to be comfortable in the convenience of silence.

I wonder how I would behave

if my words could carry violence

if the weight of my eyes could violate from 500 feet.

It is 90 degrees and sunny

I am breathing hard and his gaze follows the sweat which drips down my sports bra, past my stomach and over my thighs.

Maybe it is not sweat but tears.

I could have put on a tank top

but I wanted to feel the sun.

So I finish.

I call the kids over and tell them that whether a girl is 8, or 18, or 80, no man has a right to her body or her dignity

not with his eyes or his words or his hands

that their voices must always be loud against those who would steal the sun from their skin.

Especially

when men and women on the news and social media tell us

that we are over reacting or overly emotional when we speak up against the brutality of words which have been so weaponized that the fallout will affect our daughters and their daughters

and the ash will land on their granddaughters still.

They suggest our skin should be thicker

but I don’t need another layer of cells and keratin

I don’t need a tank top

I don’t need a hazmat suite to make my way through generations of toxic masculinity and the women who defend it

simply so I can finish an early morning run.

clutched in his hands

because his mama told him protestors are

burning

things down.

I don’t know where to start.

So we watch some peaceful protests

I don’t show him the murder but I tell him that George called out for his mama.

He cries.

I tell him about Tamir Rice

and Tyre King

and how toy guns in their black hands

were death sentences.

He weeps.

I tell him that cops are people and some are bad just like some people are bad

but the problem is that the bad cops are allowed to be bad

allowed to hurt boys who look like him

and then go home to their mamas.

I explain racism

as best as you can explain a senseless thing

to a child that doesn’t see color or understand hatred.

So I tell him that yes

the people are burning

I

am burning

and the pain and the anger and the fear that black and brown mamas have been holding for so long

is now demanding justice.

I see all the empathy and compassion missing from so many others

pouring out of a ten year old’s eyes

and I can’t help but wonder

maybe if we taught all our children the truth about how we got here

together they would make us a world

that didn’t have to burn.

Their tiny brown bodies so fragile

that even a hand placed too low

or too high

would fail to support their necks

and they would break.

They grew as strong and as American as the trunks of apple trees

but still I am afraid

of the intentional placement of knees

on brown and black necks

not fragile but weakened

by these chains that don’t look heavy until you’ve worn them a hundred years.

I watched my babies as they slept

my heart stopped each time their chests took a millisecond too long to rise

but they always did rise, and then I too could breathe again.

To suffocate must feel

like you are drowning slowly

like the air is right there if you could just reach the surface

if only the blurry hands and voices begging for your breath were strong enough to break through and save you.

Instead only the black pavement held you like a mother’s chest until there was no more sky.

And the strange slow violence of your murder played again and again like nursery rhymes

like prayer

reminding us

Beneath a backdrop of city streets

she sleeps

Her heart beats a fragile rhythm of forgiveness

dark eyes echoing the ever present reminder

that He

wanted a son

and She was not ready

to lose Him.

Xochitl is an ear of corn

reaching for warmth

praying for breath.

Learning lullabies of sacrifice

fed on angry words and cold silences

rocked on the waters of lost childhoods.

She is a survivor,

trying…

Another morning waking up to the red letters of CNN spilled like blood across my sheets

a moment of panic as thoughts gather and I account for the pieces of my heart

scattered across the country like crumbs for the wolves

and then breakfast.

This is ritual.

We swallow school shootings like sweet tea,

and I am not numb I am just

used

to heartbreak.