TAR

by Jess

The world is burning, 

So I took a lighter and match, 

And set fire to my craft, 

So my nails could saw and sear my keyboard, 

So black plastic can burn and rise, 

Sting wide nostrils, smoke Spanish shaped eyes, 

With memories of my community in zip ties, 

Hoping its loud clack might drown and drown, 

The images of  that little girls tears, 

As her mom was forcefully pushed down, 

By a non-native in a black vest,

Twisting our poetry into tar, 

To gag our syllables and curls, 

As white women recorded and watched, for their performative internet fodder, 

A small brown girl escorted home, without her father. 

So I go deep in the iambics of colonizer language, 

Because they cut, lynched and burned our tongues, 

In the Rio Grande of Texas,

And from Boston, 

I can hear the screams of Chicago and Canal Street. 

They can come and hang me from the Texas Oak Trees, 

In high June, 

Before they take the words  in me,

They can tighten the rope, 

Make it a hundred degree day, 

Scorched earth and crackling grass, 

The smell of magnolias and cookouts, 

They will see the blue come over me, 

Before they take the Mexican me. 

Jess is a Mexican American / Arab Proxmate human rights activist and writer from South Texas. She has been nominated for a PEN Robert J. Dau Prize and Pushcart Prize for her story "Feathers." Her poetry and op-eds have been published by Dissident Voice, The International Human Rights Art Movement, Poets x Hunger, and Missing Perspectives. She has forthcoming work with Writers Resist and Radical Catalyst Literary Journal. She holds a masters from Brandeis in Conflict Resolution.