“Minority”

Color de carne, skin color, colored hands, hands colored with pieces of the Atlantic’s warm stomach /spinal cord of pueblos indigenas / pacific thunder and drastic rain, you tell me, tú me dices, I can’t paint the billboards of my skylines with my words (mís palabras) because I am brown and “brown” means backwardness, atrazao’, Old World, smelling like machetes and an uncivilized big wide mouth? My skin will tell you everything you need to know, I will keep writing because brown means I can write in the corners of my people’s minds, I can speak/write/scream/be myself/be unique and still be my type of civilización, and I can be diferente , something, my darling, you lack.            

           —“Minority”

                 

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Decolonizing Hair

“Decolonizing cabellos

Dark brown
Dim romantic night looking spheres
Colored in love with hints of sugar cane
Yellow Jabao’
Melena caprichosa, mal entendida, no sumisa, a ti qué te importa cabellera
Mente suelta
Forestation of the natural
Colonization, out of my scalp!
Display
curls/straight/wavy/rebelde/ I don’t have a type of hair
Show
long/short/medium/a lo macho
como te dé la gana hair
Stop combing árboles of history
Your grandmother
Africana/ taina/mezcla
was a badass
Basass like “I know my ancestry”
Badass like ” I am beautiful”
Badass, edgy, conscious, leída, extravagante
like an evolution
like a revolución of the
“you need to fix your hair”
Do it!
Descoloniza your hair.”