BIO
María Fernanda is an early-career poet whose poems and translations appear in The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, The Wide Shore, Kweli Journal, and elsewhere. Featuring at The Brooklyn Museum, The Ecuadorian American Cultural Center, The Phoenix Art Museum, and more, María Fernanda has received fellowships from Callaloo Writers Workshop, CantoMundo, and VONA/Voices of Our Nation. María Fernanda is a Black Ecuadorian American and an adoptee with a cultural background branching to Louisiana, Texas, and (a native of) Washington D.C. @mariafernanda________
"I celebrate with great love my Ecuadorian Blackness and the intricacies of Blackness throughout the diaspora. Works by Nikky Finney, Aracelis Girmay, Robin Coste Lewis, Aimé Césaire, and more reflect for me that neither my work nor myself is constricted to a single language." —María Fernanda
Two Birthdays
For Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
Sweat roves
Liseth's burnt cheek
like a vagrant.
Her passenger view brims
of sky.
Even if in pieces,
mi hijita, there
is pleasure in returning
to the earth, you
came from.
Her mother’s words stress
Liseth’s hands, closed,
the way grown hands
are buried or burned.
Close to the sun,
the gravel-packed road lies,
hot enough to fry
eggs on, rick
grass stems together
for sitting, and eat,
if there are chickens.
The road sepulchres
her family’s blood
over and over
and now, too.
A rollover crash—as if foaling,
Liseth’s bus lands.
Glass scatters—flesh,
crushed seats, and vinyl
wedge under Liseth’s
fingernails. She grips
the bus floor for friction.
Her breath leaves, kithless.
Wild morning glow, flexuous
in her eyelashes, opens
the apricot void. Her eyes close.
The medics click
their hand lights.
Liseth’s eyes rise,
no different from two kites,
unscathed after a storm.
Medics lift, from Liseth,
her daughters’ twin
bodies, each of a dark
sand.
The nearby, local
newspaper snaps
photos of the crashed
bus and the frayed
clothes, waving.
No record of Liseth
—her wrists, beating,
strain the stretcher’s strap
as she calls for her babies.