Poetry/Prose Poetry
Watch me reading an abridged version of my poem for the Cuban Five, "Imagine This."
Bombazo! by Aurora Levins Morales is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
chicken house goat girls
We were the only girls who wore pants, she said, sitting across the orange plastic table at a fast food joint in Brooklyn, forty years after we said goodbye on a rainy morning in late spring in the cordillera of our hearts. Now we live in cities but we both dream in unfurling fern leaves under the shade of towering pomarosas. We still have red clay mud in our bellies, in our pores, in every cell. What we are made of: mud, pomarosa, cold spring water.
Among all the skirted girls of the barrio, among all the women in their flowered cotton dresses worn thin from pounding on river rocks, among all the women and girls sitting on porches shelling beans at dusk, I answer, we were the only ones who climbed trees, guamá, guayaba, flamboyán, pino, the only girls with skinned knees and burrs in our hair, with dirt under our nails, the only girls who let the dogs sniff our crotches and laughed. No seas cabra, the neighbor women would snap, and their daughters would settle back onto the porches and smooth their skirts down, waiting to be called on. You and I, we bucked and skipped and played with boys, and ran shouting through the dusk among the fireflies.
La vieja told me her Taino grandmother was caught stealing food on the hacienda, decked only in her long black hair, was hunted with dogs, locked in a room, forced into a dress and a marriage. The rest of her life they called her La Tormenta because she would as soon smack a man across the face with a dried salt cod as look at him. But she taught her granddaughter how to make the birthing mats, where to dig for the best roots, how to keep her own name in a secret place under her tongue, at the back of her knees, a dark pool of knowing.
We would steal fruit from fenced-in trees, run from dogs, take off our clothes, throw rocks at our enemies. We had our own rebellions.
Do you remember the chicken house? she asks and I think the smell of fertilizer, sacks of it piled in the back, old broken furniture, hoes and rakes, an outgrown tricycle. Of course I do. Her skinny little hips, lying back on a bag of clothes, the cement floor, sunbeams full of dust motes, the hummingbirds in the bushes, the lizards skittering up the walls, thickets of ginger standing guard, and two girls with Taino eyes, our hair full of twigs, dirt under our nails, laughing as we sniffed, our scabbed knees parted, digging for roots.
© 2010 Aurora Levins Morales. All rights reserved.
Among all the skirted girls of the barrio, among all the women in their flowered cotton dresses worn thin from pounding on river rocks, among all the women and girls sitting on porches shelling beans at dusk, I answer, we were the only ones who climbed trees, guamá, guayaba, flamboyán, pino, the only girls with skinned knees and burrs in our hair, with dirt under our nails, the only girls who let the dogs sniff our crotches and laughed. No seas cabra, the neighbor women would snap, and their daughters would settle back onto the porches and smooth their skirts down, waiting to be called on. You and I, we bucked and skipped and played with boys, and ran shouting through the dusk among the fireflies.
La vieja told me her Taino grandmother was caught stealing food on the hacienda, decked only in her long black hair, was hunted with dogs, locked in a room, forced into a dress and a marriage. The rest of her life they called her La Tormenta because she would as soon smack a man across the face with a dried salt cod as look at him. But she taught her granddaughter how to make the birthing mats, where to dig for the best roots, how to keep her own name in a secret place under her tongue, at the back of her knees, a dark pool of knowing.
We would steal fruit from fenced-in trees, run from dogs, take off our clothes, throw rocks at our enemies. We had our own rebellions.
Do you remember the chicken house? she asks and I think the smell of fertilizer, sacks of it piled in the back, old broken furniture, hoes and rakes, an outgrown tricycle. Of course I do. Her skinny little hips, lying back on a bag of clothes, the cement floor, sunbeams full of dust motes, the hummingbirds in the bushes, the lizards skittering up the walls, thickets of ginger standing guard, and two girls with Taino eyes, our hair full of twigs, dirt under our nails, laughing as we sniffed, our scabbed knees parted, digging for roots.
© 2010 Aurora Levins Morales. All rights reserved.
Imagine This by Aurora Levins Morales is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.auroralevinsmorales.com.
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