Category: Poetry

my fire is not for symbolism
for your joint or cigarette

it is to make me a martyr for the war
the fight forced on those on the bottom
of the color wheel

my fire is not for symbolism
for white women to try and put out
with their tears made of punishment
and pride

it is for brown and black girls
who have never seen a way out
who have never had guidance…

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You were a person, you lived, and
you tried to avoid pain. But pain is entangled in life, and
can’t be extracted. Still–
like every human being, you tried.

You were a woman, deified and dismissed, both angel
and monster, always through a lens, always
compelled to be beautiful.
Beautiful to whom?

You were a mother. Your heart was split open
like a pomegranate– sacrificed,
though it never felt like a sacrifice.

You were a writer (possibly)
every tender meat hook of an image on the page,
reality poured through the sieve,
and so little made it through in the end.

You are tired.
No longer care to continue unpacking
mysteries, rising and falling with the karmic wheel—
up and down, the lesson never learned.
This page, too, will be turned.…

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my dad died two days before trump was sworn in for the second time. i’m not sure i ever saw myself in his face but i thought I’d at least recognize the pieces of me that came from him. etched somewhere against the life he’d lived and the things he saw. maybe side by side id be able to ware down the hardness of his eyes and see them in my own. I’m still a child, his child, one that has not known much else but ease, and ease looks different, it feels different. ease to me is, never being limited. I think your hardness came from the potential for so much more. the things you didn’t get to live and the things you didn’t get to see.…

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I walk past the same corner each day
where I would sit between classes
and talk to you, where the skateboarder
nearly collided
into me
as you spoke of your old friend
who was dying of cancer
but wouldn’t stop smoking
and I complained of my anemia
how I barely had the energy
to stand in front of a class
for thirty minutes

And all the time I was wondering
how much longer
we could keep it going
because this was a thing
we had been doing for twenty years
without ever agreeing to
or addressing it because
that might entail giving it up…

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As she sat
bent over,
in the least-smudged chair of my garden set,
my sister told of
a neighbour who styled his garden
—its stubborn hedges and out-of-average-reach trees—
with hair tweezers and nail clippers (for feet).

As she drank
her coffee,
cross clover continued to unroot the grass,
and drunk wasps circled ground-struck apricots,
while unimpeachable ivy
succeeded in suffocating the “permanent” plants
in the borders—green nooses left unseen.

As my eyes
grazed over
the playfully growing decay, I knew
she wasn’t talking about my nature
and though I already had my answer, I still asked
my sister—
‘You think the garden has something to say[?]’

– Josje Weusten…

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Outside the wide front windows, rain is washing
the field of concrete with sheets of
water, the cars sitting like obedient puppies
as grime falls away from their coats

Outside the windows, laughing people scurry
under any overhang to keep dry and
pull back their children who strain to slap the soles
of their feet -and the soul of
their hearts- against the shining surface of
gathering puddles

Outside the windows, two men sit where they
found refuge for smokers under the
window overhang, a tin can as ashtray balanced
on the bench between them,
the profile of the elder showing him speak as
the younger reaches a hand to touch
the frail man’s shoulder.

Inside the windows, the air has turned the shade
found at the mouth of a cave, shadows
in far corners, growing darker deeper inside the
usually bright bar.…

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the streets are slick with Fidel Castro’s ambition. Tears and blood flow through the pipes underneath and remain collected in the large clay jars planted in front of my family’s former homes. Red, white, and blue patriotism may be a reason for execution if arranged improperly on the flag. America still restricts travel to the island, where my father is unrecognizable as a citizen of the United States. The streetlights cease even to flicker above crumbling roads that were once a path through the Pearl of the Antilles. Graying yellow and teal buildings surrender themselves to relentless winds that whip up from the sugarcane fields to reveal only an overpowering flavor of salt instead. The city brings memories too painful to explore into the hearts of my abuelos; it is a reminder that the grass was greener and the ocean more inviting.…

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