On December 15, New York's Loisaida Center hosted a poetry reading in which current and former fellows of the national Latina/o poets workshop CantoMundo read from their work in solidarity with ongoing protests and mobilizations in and around Ferguson, Missouri, and the College of Ayotzinapa in Iguala, Mexico. NACLA is publishing a series from the event.
In the bodies of electric fences
That still sing
I am somewhere
Deserts have claimed
Good evening sir I am a sixth
seal
opening
in how are you this evening no I live here
for years
my brother
a gardener a war
hurricane factory
wiped out
most of our family I’m sorry I’m not sure
what
profile
you say
I’m fitting
Why I’m harmless
as hello kitty nothing
to conceal I instagram
warrior poses my hoodie
is bright pink I know
the silent letters
never join the fun
and then make it all weird say every year
is my year say just today
I was elected commissioner
of a fantasy football league sir I’m sorry
That’s an old address
I hang at the halls of justice
I’m a super friend
in a shared universe
Vigilante no
I’m your flex player
I’d strip a new skin
before I allow interception
No I don’t get involved no I’m
gainfully employed
in the land of a thousand dances
Yes sir it’s getting late let’s say
If there’s a lockout and no more
Yellow brick road
And my word
sand and wind good evening sir
Let’s get down to it
I’ve come for my brother
I’ve walked all night for him
I am the unburied dreams of this desert
This desert fed the power lines
of so many fallen cities
Born to a Mexican mother and Jewish father, Rosebud Ben-Oni is a CantoMundo Fellow and the author of SOLECISM (Virtual Artists Collective, 2013). Her work has appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, Bayou, Puerto del Sol, among other publications, with more work forthcoming. Rosebud is an Editorial Advisor for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts; find out more about her at 7TrainLove.org.
