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.
