I have felt rage two times in my life. These days I feel angry more often than I use to. It’s something I’m ashamed of because white women taught me that to be a lady one must be gentle, submissive, meek, and thin. I’m a fat woman. And fat women have to perform gentleness, submissiveness, and meekness extra hard to convince others they are feminine. And so my entire life anger has manifested as tears and not as unwavering spoken truths. My desire to be wholesome and pure and mother and daughter is at constant war with my equal desire to be woman before I am mother and daughter, untamable, fucking infuriated, infinite, not yours, unpalatable to those that are comfortable with the status quo. I am a woman. I am a fat woman. I am a Brown, fat woman. My great great great grandmother was kidnapped at a cornmill by a man who pulled her onto his horse by her braid and made her his wife. I’m fucking livid. My parents crossed deserts over and over and over, slept with only a blanket of stars, risked their lives, to make the pilgrimage to Aztlan, their ancestral home that was stolen from their ancestors and extended to the northernmost corner of present day California, Utah, Colorado, and Texas only to find that the sons and daughters of colonizers rewrote history so that they could treat them like scum. I’m fucking livid. I’m Mestiza. Some of my ancestors were White colonizers. Maybe that’s why I’m comfortable in White spaces, with White people, why I’ve only dated White men, why I want to be gentle and pure and proper, that side of the tribe is beckoning me home and trying to colonize my body, my mind, my heart. With equal force the other tribe is pulling me in the opposite direction. Yo soy de la raza de oro. Origin stories say my people come from the dirt, sprouted from maize, were birthed by the sun. My people loved war, offered sacrifice to the gods of rain and storm and night and magic to the deities of the underworld and death and fertility, childbirth, and sexuality. They honored gods of song and dance and lakes and springs. This must be why I’m wild, why I won’t be silenced for much longer, why my body takes up more space. Every day these dualities are at play, they remind me I’ll never fully feel at home anywhere, not even in this body. This is why it feels like my existence is resistance. Because people are dumbfounded when I open my mouth and my speech is “eloquent.” I talk good for a Mexican. People assume I’m American Indian before they assume I’m the daughter of Mexican immigrants because Mexico exports criminals and people that are lazy while simultaneously taking your jobs. And when I don’t mow your lawn, watch your kids, or serve your tacos it’s hard to make sense of who I am. Because when people ask where I went to school and I say Penn they ask me about Sandusky the pedophile because the first thing they think of is Penn State. This is why I’m tired. This is why I’m angry. It feels like I believe things, chase things, am made up of things that are never going to converge.

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
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