To The Girl Who Used “Hence” In Her Essay
sometimes it is vinegar and water, or is that oil and blood? that could be Chevron and hangings, not sure. Katrina or Flint, South Bronx or Rosewood; the embers flung from the roofs of mouths and burnt buildings. we wear bandanas to hide the dust, tack dictionaries to our deaths to learn how to spell atrocities better. each city has its suicides, their mass graves, their limits to viewers, i suppose. when does it become too thick? the heat of somebody under some clouds and a God, mystical at best, magical only in the way bunnies hop out of hats, niggers hop out of hummers, spirits hop out of bodies when bullets happen. bullets, like periods, like points at the end of a sentence, whether grammatical or incarcerated. injustices happen, regardless of the structure they sit in, some in college, others at sit-ins.
you can collapse under the weight that the world will proffer you, trade off, even. name a price. ignore the tableau of black mass held up like a saint, at gunpoint, sparkling underneath the gaze of white wonder, unearthing capes blown in the wind by the deli spot. might have to burn a church down. think not? think tanks/big business = big dollars. pull knots out of wombs, out of unborn ideas. there is life in the murder of a dream, the whitewashing of a message. watch the way the flesh falls when the withering happens.
ahhh, language…how defiant, how non-compliant you are when strangling the slur or slang out of the mouth of babes, the moth mocking the light, the scholar, the school the lecturer was reared in. sucking the ticking out of the time
bomb blasting out of a boom-box and the electricity involving the dash, the ever-evolving dash— dipping through lines like Black-beauty, intelligent-Latina, Brown-power-shifters. you are afraid of what we will do with the paragraph, con a suit and tie made of your skin coat, pero check the pockets for fragments and colorisms, para brown paper bags and the other tropes, that tea party and Trump type shit that slits broken homophobes out of their bassinets.
because hence is not your word, either. neither is America. both language and continent, stolen. living on land not his nor yours, not ours. this unholy land, justified by stripes, with strikes in-between stars and shattered vertebrae. who claims this? who wants this piece of arbitrary? my Lilah, little one, will have her gumption questioned, her breasts spoken to, still with fires to tend to. a professor may question her lingua, her lines, not privy to her lineage, lined with a history of revolucionarios, freedom fighters, teachers with books inscribed in the bottom of their palms, passing out leaflets in churches and assembly lines. we were writers then. i tell them, the obtuse lecturers, i tell them to their face, their degrees do not matter to us. we are lions. we are bulls, Gods and santerias, Yoruba tribal war yielders. you do not write for us. you cannot teach us. you do not know how to die, how we are born to do, to be reborn again in the spirit of an aunt or wave, or sky, an astral plane. you cannot tell us what words are ours.
the floor feeling
like a million moons
or rocket ships rallying
the cries for resistance, for change
change to a structure
that would question the
merits of a student
rather than applaud the
diligence of the pupil.
how did she write this? better, how did she not? because, you could not. yo’, you cannot understand Ebony or Chola, Boricua or Brown, Brown v. Board of Edu., Brown v. busing, plight and pigment, because pigment does not mean plunder, does not mean sex me, does not mean use me as a road, an exit sign, a train track. you would not know rickety classroom chairs, mildew in textbooks, penises drawn in them, learning with thirty heads in a class, dirty desktops, swinging your pen in honor of the generation before, who do not know FAFSA. a generation who does not know bilingual, only lottery numbers and phone cards. red marks on papers mean nothing, when blood pits stain trees just the same. we learn from colors, not from gringos; from back walls of basement parties, black lights and Baldwin, us chewing on the cardboard cutouts of the ones you told us to love. we loathe you, you with dry wit and “look at my success, my bootstraps, built on liquor and slave tendon.”
we have been teaching you
long before you thought
you began teaching us
hombre.
