BIO
Rocio Franco is an emerging Latinx poet and activist from Chicago, IL. She is a 2020 Frost Conference on Poetry Alum. She works as a health insurance counselor at a non-profit union health fund. She loves exploring the city with her husband and daughter on the weekends, practicing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and approaches the world with a social justice lens.
Instagram: chio_la_chingona
La Lucha Es Constante
Nos
cansamos de llorar
pero no de
luchar.
El sistema
nos quiere rendir
pero no
podemos fingir
que la
justicia es algo fácil.
El pueblo
sigue para adelante.
Aunque nos
cansemos de llorar,
pero nunca de luchar.
A Saturday Afternoon in Our Urban Landscape
i am
in a small backyard
made of concrete &
soil
with the first people
that showed me
love
más agua que sangre it’s
steamy outside over 90 degrees & the sun is bearing
down on us mi
cuñado grills chorizo on an old
rusty garbage can with a steel grate
on top
my nieces & nephews jump
in & out of old tires a
jumble of giggles the youngest
picks a stick to draw
some abstraction in the dirt while the adults sit on milk crates
& rusty chairs we are here for no particular reason other than to celebrate the weekend
& the simplicity that poverty brings there is not much to marvel in this humble landscape
but we are tribe each having survived our
own personal slaughters