There is something familiar
and deeply exquisite in
the way my island brown
crescendos against
your mainland brown in this
bastardized communion of
flesh more god than divine image.
And this is not to say that
the personal is always
political, or
however the saying goes, but
there is a certain relish in
tangling fingers through
curls that crave aceite de coco
as much as my own
And is not a prayer like this
a most defiant of independence days?
Is there not a kind of gleeful beauty in
ringing in Carnaval de Febrero with
un Grito de Dolores? Is there not
a certain reclaiming
of long-colonized soil
when our bodies ripen upon it?
And this harvest may never reach past
the next sunrise on the skyline,
and we may return
to a richly platonic
admiration
of each other’s art and
general
human-
-ness, but
let us revel in
shared histories of
waters crossed, be they
Big River or gaping Gulf,
in our shared lengua
Europeans left stained across
our ancestors’ tongues,
in a child of Cacike Anacaona and
a child of Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin meeting
countless lifetimes after
conquistadores thought they
had beaten us down if only for one
seditious night.
