after Lorna dee Cervantes & Rosebud Ben-Oni
My body is a midnight church. & when the blue of your mouth
broke open a black estuary depositing soiled slurs & sediment,
frothing feral words kept you from being forgotten. Your
tongue lashed shame into submission so I would know
you were a proud man, like my father, shaking your
hands & your head a machete striking blows against my resistance
when I tried to explain that my poetry was—
for women, martyred by men they disagreed with
women, for 27 de Febrero en la puerta del conde
women, for antidictatorship viva la revolución, si se puede
women, for La Guerra de 1965 fuera con los Yanquis
women, for teachers & students, poets & writers, activist women.
& then “esos gringos” y “el Haitiano” sullied out of your
bullhorn mouth like volcanic rocks ejected from a fallow
burning field, & false idol monuments erected in the town square
in honor of la patria. Again, I tried to justify that my poetry was—
for women, amas de casa bearing rifles & marching in skirts
women, for chanting in verse to deliver their boys from exile
women, for red moon buzzing butterfly assassin
women, for sharp tongue cracked tooth camouflage combat boots
women, for pregnant resistance & fighting womb relic
women. For the type of woman I was before you
fissured your fleshy mouth open & ruptured hot, marked your own
territory with a stream of words that muddied my tongue &
pursed my lips shut until I crawled inside my midnight church
& plucked red orange, pomegranate & pale pink roses
from my cheeks. & I laced them into a bullet-proof crown of words
on my head, in memory of the women who are more
than a talking head statue in the center of an abandoned park
where the men like you go to weep.
