Banned portrait in the MAGA era: Afro-Latina texts her brother
~
why do I keep doing
this to myself?
so many wypipo, all
around me,
and the funk and soul music plays on
one black man singing
to a shaded white crowd:
one man’s tapping foot,
two women dancing
all elbows and jut.
i can’t help counting.
i’m the only one who echoes the songs.
~
When
thrumming joy electrifies the man,
I
am unprepared for his double take,
his
call of my name, recognition of my book,
his
seeing me.
I
feel my own entangled
sinews
loosen, the sleeted stoicism of neck
crick
dissipate like the only melting glacier
I
have ever wanted.
~
Somewhere
there is a camera
watching
ice fall,
complicit
in the collapse.
~
In Philadelphia, I
imagine melting, too,
earthen body become ice
mocking,
sweat glistening the
skin to diamonds.
There he is reading my
texts and laughing.
He gives me his
password for Game of Thrones.
Is winter still coming
or is it here? I forget.
~
Blood current coursing
around floe sugars:
This must be my
brother’s claret now,
now that the diabetic
devil has returned,
cloaked in ragged white
and dancing drunk, I was always here
calling your name.
~
It’s the day of Pride.
Stonewall push back
against police.
Rainbows forget brown
and black as colors.
As people.
White isn’t there either …
is it?
~
Eleggua,
spirit of crossroads,
the
santeros call San Antonio,
saint
of lost things. He carries
an
old man’s stick, tumbling
like
a boy, dressed in ragged
clothes,
red and black.
~
Striped paths lead to a rail-warm iron place.
Sunken places twist waters from many bodies.
~
What have I lost now?
I have a puckering
bitterness.
~
I
left all the handkerchiefs I bought
to
sop my weeping, back
in
my ruin-rising house.
To
come here, I pierced my skin with chains
with
dragging spikes,
splayed
in their frigid trail like a comet,
burning
in ice,
facing
the consuming void.
~
somewhere there is a
black child
holding their hand to a
candle
to see a red tide
course
around bone spindles,
.forgetting the burn
to witness a thin film
peeled away to true.