Por El Grito, Canto We Can't Hear

Canto: This is the song. for when my Latino Literature class and I dread. that moment brown teacher points to us. have to read out loud the page in front. parentheses between the words Latina/o kids (in college even) can’t read and stumble over. let fry and clank, mash up our bean rice corn teeth mouth tongues. on syllables, can’t pronounce strange long words we weren’t taught in sucky CPS. insecure about reading. and always soft voice. too fast and staring at page. for few awkward forever seconds. when don’t know the word “precarious” in poem. paralyzing pressure affects silence. when you know s/he’s perplexed. know I've skipped word and sentence doesn't make sense now. you have to start over. everyone's waiting. and I can feel the weight of moment in your heart. moment that when it happens to all of us. just skip it. skip school. skip chances. and skip our voice. truth skips us. and rights and futures skip our children. and we begin to loose our Spanish to this silence too. and we don’t even understand ourselves anymore.

Grito: Por los que no entienden, y por los que si. Por “no speake ingles” y por “for why you go to de parque.” make you switch your soul and syntax, circumstance, religions, to fit our heathen history and make you worship our feathered panthered sunned browned gods. hairy hairless tongue your way. out of this one. you can suck it. out nopales y chile thorns up top your teeth. moist and molar mole mouth until you cry. ‘cause your children are talking words you can’t comprehend. and hate and love this place you’ve been dragged to. ‘cause back home is need and you’re always giving. clutter of useless phrases you’ll have to memorize. and agonize. we’ll roast lengua de white men, conquistadores in our blood dinner. when Mexico is taken back and we force you to wash our dishes and take your minimum of minimum wage to the currency exchange. in country you can’t or wouldn’t want to claim anyways. gritando with our loud-ass rancheros down Western and Astro vans con la Virgen on spare tire. grita, the sound of success when it’s a brown girl as president. through college y el movimiento. took kids y abuelitos al capital to cry. and brown girl presidenta just gave us Mexico without a war. all because of words. were proud to fumble with.

Ratoncita Cousin.

Ratoncita Cousin.

Adriana is a dark skin and attitude like her father girl. She is the oldest, smacking Frankie over the head but watching out for while giggling and loving little Alexis, her sweet surprise little sister. With a thick head of Puerto Rican should have been curly but is straight and black Mexican oil hair that is long and long and thick as a horsetail she wears in one tough ponytail down her back for Alexis to braid small knots in and call them pretty and for Frankie to pull and swing from her like a Tarzan tree trunk older sister.

When we played as kids, she was always the Jasmine and I was always the Aladdin. She was a beautiful child and has grown up to be a beautiful young woman. But she is the type of girl that knows she is beautiful. Popular and full of spunk and plays soccer with boys because it’s fast and fun, not for the boys that fawn over her, but notices that too so she is always laughing.

Got her period at 11 or 12. So early it scared the woman in the family, speculating and suspecting the hormones in all the 2% and American cheese she loved eating as a kid (we called her ratoncita) to be the reason for her early thrust into maturity. Something in the Indiana water turns brown girls that should have been raised in Chicago with her other brown cousins or something in brown blood that made her always older than she was.

I found her diary sitting on the sofa one day, not knowing what it was, opened it and the page said something about dry humping on her boyfriends couch. Closed it quick. Growing up fast girl. Remember she is 15 and I was just about the same age the first time I fooled around, dry anythinged with anyone. I worry that she will be like her mother, like all our mothers, and get pregnant at a young age, unmarried, surprised and alone. But then I realize that all of our mothers raised us fine. If all of our mothers hadn’t been careless, or passionate, wild and unruly young woman, none of us would have ever been born. And she is laying on the couch with a baby that is premature, small druggy-baby—tubes and incubators and blinking lights to measure the measures—her mother is babysitting and Adriana is on the couch sleeping with this warm small thing nestled on her chest.

Finger Out Our Demons.

my biggest lonely is a demon. makes want so many bodies. must Gabriel and smite my sex with swords. shove aside all the silly stripes and spots. sex crosses eyes. bends my knees in sultry spinning slow and up worship. his body and movement is constant and change is my new religion. truth is under microscope his eyes. love is when we've sexed the sex out of us. and still need each other. is undeniable reason for being. is only to find one. find and forget about looking for big white clouds to save us. 'cause we can save ourselves. with a little bit of love his head on my chest and the hairs. were shy to show each other. confessions and looking up at crucifix. just want to run hands down line they must have methodically chiseled that v down his white pelvis that stops where cloth you know shouldn't be there. is covering up natural and right and real and something to be proud and praise and want to pull. all of that Jesus into your Eucharist. palms open. mouth kneeling tongue. out to put teeth in wine and all prickles up leg. wrapped around this worship. on the alter sacrifice and spasm, pain and push, and pain and moan, and push and take. and this is where we come from. this is where all the demons are baked and broken.

My Mother as Christ, Self-Crucifixion.

Crucifying herself with one hand free to raise me and the other driving the stakes through her palms. Where I crawled out of her embrace and where Tuesday slipped in to encourage Jesus saves and every Sunday morning together, push the iron in a little closer to the wood splinters splitting love. Two lesbians, one black the other brown, in the back of church sad singing and hoping. An agonizing confusing worship that still fills them something I can’t, won’t understand anymore. She still sends me little pamphlets about prayer and the New White Pope and the Passion of Christ and the Dangers of Evolution. Always asking if I’m praying and when I’m praying and reminders to go to church and pray. She’s more concerned with what I believe than the topics I try to talk to her about Latina writers and ethnocentric attitudes and anthropology and so many big words and big ideas. I can see her proud-of-me eyes sweeping big words aside and butting in the conversation I was only having with myself. Her eyes say, “praise God for your fortunes and bless you for the future,” and then I give up trying to talk about what matters to me with her. And we sit in the restaurant, couch, hallway, bus, forever not talking, but wanting to hear something of each other’s heartbeats. Crawl back into each other where we all came from place. Where words don’t get in the way, and there’s no need for to worship worry words here. I try to figure out why I write this endless and why this story must be. The meditations like prayers, each one too deeply personal to edit down. Write more and more, remembering specific persons, places, and experiences in this, live to make sense of her life and ours and everyone’s. This eternal constant. Whisper, “prayer praying prayer praying prayer.” I was born to save her. She was crucified to save me. She wasn’t born with this pen to drive into her palms like I do. She took the cross, forever nailed feet in place, in faith and condemnation from sour Saint sisters. Her tired worn down bone and blood dripping feet, standing security guard, worn out callus stand and sit down of church and running in circles grinding knees, heavy wood family on her bent broken back, tense neck and crown of thorns. She took the cross. So I could kneel and start new religions.