Elisabeth Contreras-Moran
Poetry
Sin and Science
I chose to alter my altar after the nuns told me I had to pray for my mother’s
sinful soul, for daring to walk away from weary weakness so she could forge her
strength in singularity. No monotheism could hold a torch to the fierceness of a
single mother doing the right thing, which they resolutely decried as wrong. A
little older, I questioned letters of their law as I learned facts about the universe:
its audacious ancientness, its perseverance despite disaster after disaster, its
epochs of change and regrowth. My questions tasted like tortillas, rather than the
bread of the Eucharist. I could see the poetic purpose of those constantly
changing constants: Mother Earth indeed. And older still, I pushed and pulled
against the patriarchal rules that needed to be splintered and snapped for failing
women in so many innumerable ways. I’d rather be lifted up by feminine voices
softly speaking Spanglish than shoved down by harsh masculine hands pushing
false folkloric traditions. So, yes, at this age, I choose sin and science. For the
lyrics of luminescent life, for the beauty of boundless bounty, for the aureate
answers to the archaic. Sin and science, how perfectly poetic.
Bio
Elisabeth Contreras-Moran is a Latina environmental scientist turned writer and poet. She has degrees from Princeton University and John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY and became a doctoral candidate at the Graduate Center, CUNY before she moved to rural England. She trained as a teacher in England, now home educating her son and his friends in nature immersed ways. She writes and creates at night, when the house is quiet. Elisabeth enjoys writing poetry, gardening, and authoring/illustrating children’s books. A newly emerging voice, her poetry has been in Litro Magazine with further publications scheduled soon. Though she cannot speak Spanish fluently, she sometimes dreams in it.