Concrete Rose

Location

My mother,
 
She is all split ends and spent batteries and i find myself wondering how she is able to find her feet in the morning.
Taught me how to breathe with the shattered lungs of my ancestors and salsa down our family tree. With toes encased in spanish leather heels in the colors of a million bleeding violetas dripping to her toes, she sings like a Honduran windsong. Clutching her suppressed accent to the underside of her tongue and hugging it with brass knuckle teeth to make sure to choke the intolerance out of any close-minded "gringo," as she called them but, my mother was anything but unaccepting. Type of woman to risk her own life to run inside a burning fireworks factory and save even the most xenophobic person in the world.
 
She, she has a laugh that drums it's tawny colored fingers on your ribcage and plays Como La Flor every time her face bunches into an aged grin.
She is stubborn. Always has been with a voice loud enough that it travels 3,037 miles to San Lorenzo to greet her family.
Taught me to wear my culture as an ironic fashion, only resurrected in the seams of George Lopez episodes and subtitled racism. Practiced swallowing the american dream whole in an Atomic Fireball candy while hanging upside down on rusted monkey bars coated with codeine paint and the blood of communist soldiers.
 
Taught me best she knew how. To duck behind every squad car and that
"la policía va de la mano con la 'migra', saltando a través de los campos de fuego cocaína rodeado de Teguseegalpa como una mala telenovela"
 
That they were, they were waiting to bring us back to the countries she had strapped to my backpack.
A honduraiña y cubana chicana living in a country where my name has never been a dial tone. I watch them struggle with telephone cable accent marks and light switch rolled 'r's. Attempting to swallow long distance phone calls to Americanize my identity into a close relative of Uncle Sam
"Nunca olvides tu historia, Rosita." Never forget your history.
 
So tonight,
I will sit crosslegged in my room surrounded by thrift store christmas lights and the smell of cafecito in the morning. Flipping through year books and scrapbooks and notebooks remembering the time my third grade teacher told my mother at a parent-teacher conference to "speak english, because it would be rude otherwise."
I will engrave a post-it note to my frontal lobe to remind myself to settle on your pillowcase like dust; so you can breathe me into your sleep and i can manifest night terrors from your culture-ignorance and make you sleep walk into a sea of acceptance.
 
Tomorrow, I will lie face down on my carpet stained in Dalmatian spots of Spilt Corona smiles and burning ember tears. I will, I will translate Billi Holiday songs to my grandmother while she sips on Un Mojito and tells me stories about how much sin she had left in her hips after dancing Mambo until the arches of her feet bled canela kisses. How much of her soul that had fled when a man, who later became her first husband came up to her in a bar that night with atom bomb eye sockets and a voice like the dry heaves after 6 too many, told her "Tu Creyas en Dios pero tu haces malas cosas"- "You believe in God but you do bad things." She tells me that that, night she was just trying to escape La Llorena's grip. That her tears dont just search for lost children in the dark anymore but also dead bodies framed in quotation marks. Taking puffs of charred lovers rolled in a Cigarillo.
 
And, I dont smoke, but I hold a pistol in between my teeth like a cigarette, cocking definitions through my gums with electrical pulses.
Just because I expose my jugular does not mean i have a painted target around my neck.
So this, this right here is a stubborn reminder dedicated to the boy that
told me that he will "Cling onto my Taco Bell tongue like elipses"
That my love is a foreign language that Rosetta Stone cant decipher. I hold ancient melodies of Hector Lavoe songs in-between my red wine stained lips that kiss like Dulce De Leche fireflys eating away at your insides and I will turn your right ventricle into something more than absentminded ignorance and shitty derogatory jokes.
 
I will make flowers grow in the spots you spit onto the asphalt and make you pick the petals off one by one, while you search for a god you dont even believe in, mumbling words thrown off the tips of tongues like suicides
 
But, long live that Spanish Rose that grew from concrete

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