Category: Writing & Writers

Poetry Break

from: “Ugly” by Warsan Shire

Guillermo1 Comment 
from: "Ugly"

You are her mother.
Why did you not warn her,
hold her like a rotting boat
and tell her that men will not love her
if she is covered in continents,
if her teeth are small colonies,
if her stomach is an island
if her thighs are borders?

What man wants to lie down
and watch the world burn
in his bedroom?

Your daughter’s face is a small riot,
her hands are a civil war,
a refugee camp behind each ear,
a body littered with ugly things.

Shire, Warsan. “Ugly.” Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. Mouth Mark, 2011, pp. 31-32.

Poetry Break

“For the two Utah congressmen who voted No, because “there is a chance women will return to be hit a few more times in order to stay on welfare.” by Valerie Wallace

Guillermo1 Comment 
“For the two Utah congressmen who voted No, because “there is a chance women will return to be hit a few more times in order to stay on welfare.”

                                                                  —October 1999
Ask the wife shot
& stabbed fourteen times
on her neighbor’s porch
the wife’s face
gone, on the courthouse
steps Ask the one dead in the courtroom
the one in her garage, against the garage wall
the one in her car, head split
in her children’s bedroom
ask her why she left,
if she’d go back
Before you tell her
she will return
ask if she can ever      ever
ever      get away

Wallace, Valerie. “For the Two Utah Congressmen Who Voted No, Because “There Is a Chance Women Will Return to Be Hit a Few More Times in Order to Stay on Welfare”.” Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, no. 16, 2001, p. 100.

Poetry Break

from: “Borderbus” by Juan Felipe Herrera

Guillermo1 Comment 
from: "Borderbus"

No somos nada y venimos de la nada
pero esa nada lo es todo si la nutres de amor
por eso venceremos
We are nothing and we come from nothing
but that nothing is everything, if you feed it with love
that is why we will triumph
 
We are everything hermana
Because we come from everything

Herrera, Juan F. “Borderbus.” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/91751/borderbus. Accessed 2 April 2024.

Poetry Break

“$19.42” by Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley

Guillermo1 Comment 
"$19.42"

Japanese Interment photo:
Family outside     Home
American    flag in frame
NO JAPS   WANTED
in red   In red a mother’s elbow
stained   against windowsill
Here this ink of my ancestry

for sale on Ebay.

Clark, Fred. “Poston, Arizona. Living Quarters of Evacuees of Japanese Ancestry at This War Relocation Authority . . .” Wikimedia Commons, 1 Jun. 1942, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Poston,_Arizona._Living_quarters_of_evacuees_of_Japanese_ancestry_at_this_War_Relocation_Authority_._._._-_NARA_-_536152.jpg. Accessed 31 Mar. 2024.

Kingsley, Benjamín Naka-Hasebe. “$19.42.” Colonize Me. Saturnalia Books, 2019.