LatinosUSA

Family Blood

Fall burns my flesh like rusty shades of her leaves. I cocoon in sorrow’s labored breath as I dine on erstwhile memories. My presence fades as echoes of yesterday’s nagging whispers seep through outworn cement on red-brick walls. Childhood lingers, caught between the weakness of once formidable walls that held monsters within. 

Behind the bars of my elder brain lies the wisdom of tribute.  For the monstrous things done to me were first borne by them.  Cast off as wicked boskages, to starve, beaten with two-by-fours, and a mom whose innocence was taken at the age of fourteen.  Blood drips from raw fingers as she timidly picks cotton before the humiliation of school begins.  Her raw nipples, pulled pitilessly by subjugators, she has no money to buy a cone-shaped bra.  Pale girls point with bone-idle fingers, gossip swirls around her, as sun baked features loom, donned in a flour sack dress.  Harvest money spent on a trip to town by her father.  Money meant to buy flour, sugar, and salt pork was spent on a weekend of drinks instead of winter’s staples. 

Tortured is the soul that dreams of limbs that no torso seems to partner.  In the false safety of the mountainous chill, the dimmed winter sun made visible those who lost the battle.  Tears freeze on the cheeks of a sixteen-year-old soldier in Korea.  Deserted by roots left to starvation.  His brutish cruelty thenceforth inflicted like a feral cat whose face is lost by layers of fleas?  My black eyes watch his with fear as his calculated movements during daily beatings with panties hugging skinny ankles.  I am spat out, a skeleton of war, as he was only a teenager, knee-deep in a frozen sphere of death.  Jilted in life’s savage belly, my dad was born into a portal of foreboding.

My forgiveness and sorrow for them both pour forth like a chilly spring, birthing hope.  Life can be a heinous trickster, or we can forge a path less traversed.  Understanding is a flower whose seed emerges into a path that bursts into a palette of rust, reds, and vibrant golds.  Fall is an evolution, and so are humans.  My cocoon is made from silk, discarded woe, and the molted coats of spring fawns.  Lit by fireflies, my bed, forged limbs discarded from wise trees, that now form a memento of tenderness of God’s grace and mercy for all humans.

+++

We thank Joni Caggiano very much for her collaboration.

AND

If you are a poet or a writer, or artist and wish to appear in our literary magazine, LatinosUSA (English Edition-a subsidiary of Masticadores), please contact me, Francisco Bravo Cabrera, poetry editor, at this email: ArribaPamplona@gmail.com

CHEERS