Andrew Villegas | I Won’t Italicize Our Mexican Worms

Andrew Villegas is an editor at a public radio station in Denver, Colorado. He has worked as a reporter for several publications including Kaiser Health News, NBC's Breaking News, and he covered local government and politics at the Greeley (Colo.) Tribune. His reporting work has been featured in The Washington Post, USA Today and heard on NPR. He holds English and journalism degrees from the University of Colorado in Boulder.

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Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry: Like You

February 2020

Andrew Villegas

I Won’t Italicize Our Mexican Worms

You write complicated words, the lot of you — flaked meaning to obfuscate, demean, make yourself feel worthy, big before big unfair life beats you up first. You make things your capstone. Catastrophe sailed promise on the rough Atlantic; choppy waves taught you to cut corn, things that stand to deliver their own lives to self-salvation. Your films classic: Tales of conquested adventure, taming of the You, those us. Aren’t you hoping for some same conqueror’s romance? Hernán Cortés named us hispanic, Our Lady Guadalupe finished it. Is that plain enough? Hownow, pinche gabacho, I won’t italicize our words to signal Other to you, surely guilty interaction has learned you enough of Cortés’ language, forced on those big, pissed streets. (B-T-dubs, sorry about the ShitRevenge, güey, you named it for us, we might as well embrace it) But we ain’t them. No somos Dominicanos, no Salvadoreños. No pressed, armored suite of words will protect you from the perfect cactus needle you dug out of brown-as-fuck soil left hot for us on the ground. Agave scabs livers. So we slept on them and still sleep in today. There’s no use in moving when you flex your muscles, speak our truth at us and throw corn at our feet. We’ll make tortillas, empty husks make a fine soup. We wrapped our tamales in the empty promise: Today is hard. (Save that you can, burn the rest.) Tomorrow better. Need no invitation to sniff, whine, or bat your lashes while you giggle, but remember words — between the slurred lines you leave us to read — are worms. They wiggle sightless, reproduce by violence. Cut, we become two, cut four, cut eight 16, 32, 64. You get it: Each of us has a mouth and hunger for eyes. You taught us: See the world through our squishy lenses. Why wouldn’t we eat them and return to corn, cactus and dust?

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