“[T]ry to tell me the wind don’t speak?” In a time in which we are constantly being bombarded with the erasure and belittling of survivors, from structural to gendered violence, we hear from two unstoppable poetas, Ariana Brown and Maria Lucas, who answer to another source of power: their inheritances of ancestral knowledge and magic. “For I am the prime source everything / evolves through me” writes mother and poet Maria Lucas in “Bruja.”
Read more from 'This Work Will Take Dancing' here.
Introductions
i’m ariana &
i’ve been conquered.
child of mexico, africa, usa-
i have someone else’s name.
i was born in a cemetery.
in 1848, frederick douglass
wrote an article condemning
the us conquest of mexico.
i went to the alamo
on a field trip once.
my uncle’s dream
is to own land. his
facebook photo
is him atop a horse. this
is not a joke. a border
blew through me, hooked
my grandmother’s tooth, dragged
the bones of laredo south
across the river. my grandmother’s
hometown is built on the bones
of her ancestors. pride is
a strange violence. my
grandmother’s country
had a black president
in 1829. last name guerrero,
meaning ‘warlike,’ ‘soldier.’
my father was in the air force.
he died flying.
try to tell me the wind don’t speak?
my father died before i was born.
i talk to everyone’s ancestors.
i’m a cotton twirler, shape
shifter, gravedigger. my
curandera says ‘the earth can
transform anything’.
i be buryin’ shit all the time.
Bruja
