Image courtesy of Several Seconds. Shared under a Creative Commons License.
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Illegal Aliens: A Goddamned Prayer for Roma
I can assure you all
that my mother wasn’t born from a nuclear explosion on Mars
she did not tread green slime beneath her, nothing leaked from her backside
on the plane. Mama did not come here with a girl in her belly to earn 225 dollars
a week (What is inside a woman but another woman?) I can tell you she left
her elderly mother yelping in bed like a lost animal, and I can remind you
that her father fell off of his horse and died on her birthday
some 20 years later (She cried into her cake).
When I saw Abuela in 2008, she said she could melt
into the brush from how much she missed her daughter.
She stirred a vat of rice and beans and smoothed down
the yellow edges and collapsed onto the wooden platform
of her kitchen (She could feel her daughter’s stomach
turning in Miami) Mama swims, mama drowns,
mama sucks orange from sunsets to keep full. A picket line
to Pluto. A chain of white hands around her legs.
Mama’s flag stitched into a cut on her stomach.
—
In Concepcion, La Vega
We are plucked from the sun’s hairline
like a waning basket of island fruit.
I am an uncoiled orange; this tropical undress
has kept me peeled
for hours now. With swift noon, the heat
strips your hair. It hides somewhere
in a broken pipe, somewhere
we won’t take the time to notice.
I watch your nails give way
to mango pelts.
Man, those hands spell out
Caribbean dusk to me:
watch them roll their R’s.
There is no time for frugal picking
says man with thick skins.
He is brown, rotting (face of split
cement). Your palm is ring deep in mango belly.
My head, too, loosens.
—-
Lizza Rodriguez is a sophomore at New College of Florida. Though she is a political science major, she has been writing for eight years and considers poetry her greatest passion. Recently, Lizza has begun work on a collection of poems that focuses on her parents’ immigration to the United States from the Dominican Republic. In her free time, Lizza does work on behalf of local immigration advocacy group in hopes of shedding light on the state of immigration and racial/ethnic relations in the U.S.