La Lucha
They don't know what to call women like us
Women with coffee bean eyes
noses thick like sugarcane
welded from predecessors y patria,
hair a filament of rizos y raíces
they don't know what to call
women with an ocean of ancestors
swimming against the currents of assimilation
they call us exotic, erotic, ethnic, different
anything but beautiful
can’t pinpoint the indigenous, the Spaniard, the European, the African in me
the middle passage that paints this canvas
this art
this foundation
this make up that makes us visible
this mancha de platano
this stain that proclaims I am here
we are always moving
we are a movement
never stagnant just rooted
they don't know what to call women
with mouths shaped like revolution
teeth picket line straight
tongue coated in rebellion like
Canales, Capetillo, Lebrón
we were born with la lucha
tattooed on our biceps
wrestling away labels
choking on a dust of conformity
threatening to sully the safety of language
code switching mamasotas who carry truth in our throats.
I've never known a volcano to sit on the roof of the oppressed
in hushed incantation. If you were to ask me what my
lips taste like, I would tell you, liberation.
© Maria Rodriguez Morales. Published by permission in Centro Voices on 24 April 2015.
