Fotoshop

I ask my prima Mayra how to use 

Photoshop to change golden skin to porcelain,

obsidian crowns to flax. But what’s wrong, 

says Mayra, with gold and obsidian? I remind

her of the photo of Óscar & Angie Valeria

      faces down in the Rio Grande.

Baby tucked inside papa’s shirt for safe crossing.

The picture came and went with the currents,

like the photo of the father weeping on the border

of destiny and doom, the flood of photos of mothers 

and children, aka migrants, aka refugees of forever

        wars that muzzle us with terror.

Our hushed brown flow grows so mainstream 

each miraculous drop somehow absorbed unseen.

But what if, I say, they were white families? 

Irish English Swedish babies drowning. Towheaded

        toddlers trapped in cages.

Would they breach our blind banks? Would we

breach our silence? Rise like the ocean, a furious

squall, a clamoring tormenta! Mayra is quiet,

so I say what I shouldn’t have to say: that nothing 

is wrong with gold and obsidian. But — surely —

        everybody must know that.

Rise, Compa, Rise

The fire, the portal — same thing, but I need to say it twice.

Because we are corn-cobbed people, spines stooping 

under flame-forged lies.

Criminal Illegal Barbarian Heathen. Too many Words

in this cabecita, and now she doesn’t trust her brown shadow 

black shadow, red. 

Now she takes it back inside, paints it with your white-out brush,

hallucinates herself, sees her face in everything

and everyone.

Because nothing is everywhere and this world is ending

and we’re all deciding how to die. I need to know: 

how do you want to go?

Curled in warm nylon, brain bathing in a pixel bath, 

counting out currency, property? But if that is liberty,

if that is living 

then I’m done accepting. Northern appetites devouring

southern fruits. Brown children massacred, pigtails,

textbooks, brains bleeding out. 

This is hell, this is earth — same thing, but I need to say it twice.

Till we blink open blind eyes, pluck off deaf ears,

summon the seed 

to the silk. Suck it down to the purple kernel without shame,

without pride, and come from compassion, compa,

from courage.

Till our golden bodies rise from this blood-fed earth.

Till we tell the truth beyond these base borders 

that been taught us.