Ernesto, I have many names.
Bella, Punta, Jezebel.
I was your sister in revolution’s
long skirt. My wedding veil
a balaclava, hiking citadels
with child at breast and still
they called me for my sex.
Asked for drinks of water,
that I might build shelters
for their armies with my soft
brown eyes. Said our beauty
was attic, steamer trunk
and our legs the cattle crawl.
This is not why we marched, Trotsky.
We who are the means
of production. We who have carried
Marxist bibles in our knitting needles
for century, teaching daughters the machine
of silence. We who have watched
you unmake your homes like a civilization
trapped in the belly of a whale, illuminated by
a single candle, Jonah.
They burned our grandmothers
in church pyres. Unwrote her story
so completely they forgot it is us
they still worship, Mother Mary
have mercy. They still plant flower
at your feet and call you immaculate.
Virgin. While I impudent Jezebel
lay dispossessed princess of tangled meaning
I married the King of Isreal
and became synunum for shameless
they have been calling us sluts for six
hundred years though we have tucked
our own scarlet letters like love notes
into each other’s jeans and braided romance
in this heresy. Hear me now, America.
Your shelters are the refugee camps of our hearts
and there are paper cranes in our mouths waiting
for fossil fuel extinction. This is our flight plan.
We who have learned the machine of silence
like the blind understand darkness.
We who hold chakras of revolution
as rain cellars for our daughters.
We have always been ready.
And we are reminding ourselves, now.
Advertisement
