This your native chi-town girl.

Melanin too stand-outish

for Michigander mediocrities

mirroring you mitten motherfuckers.

Just tryna outgrow normalized hierarchies

and outlive realities set along the margin that

bears forbidden truths in the golden hoops

hanging from graffiti-coated ears

as I step and splash all over

your fragile white tears.

 

This your foreign brown girl.

Just trying start a revolución

so that one day I will be unafraid to correct

the mis pron ounce i a tion of my name.

So that one day I can be unashamed

to take up institutionalized white space.

Indiscreet in my ambitions

and the fracturing of racist inhibitions so that

White feminists can kiss my ass as they vomit

white savior complexes and cry over

speeches you think will save me from my oppression

come the next Presidential election.

 

The white in you

permeates my piel

and cuts up my tongue.

Discounting my brown

for capitalistic fun.

Red lining my throat.

Stitching white dollars through it

as you take a sip

from your token Brown girl pick-me-up.

White washing Frida Kahlo while you

Fetishize panchos and profit off of

huaraches and sombreros.

Halloween comes around and you really scare the shit out of me when you reveal

cultural appropriation and profitization.

 

This your consumable brown girl.

Brown girl stealing.

Brown girl taking.

brown girl making.

Brown girl illegally

employed.

Brown girl disposable.

 

This your native chi-town girl.

The brown in me,

the sangre antigua,

are stains on your upper-class persian rugs.

Contemporary subjections infesting in

residence halls.

Micro and macro aggressions painting

checkered covered floors flooding with my sangre antigua.

The brown in me spells out institutionalized racism

In order to explain what a PWI is to you.

 

The white in you

me ve,

walking on the opposite side of the street.

Head down,

the whites of your eyes criminalize me.

The hooded super predator.

The undocumented.

The refugee.

The divergent who survived

despite you.

The brown in me,

you whitesplain,

perpetuate

and exterminate to be

“felon”.

Historically translated as

slave,

housemaid,

Jim Crow,

Donald Trump,

rusted figurines in America’s monopoly game.

They never pass Go.

No Get Out of Jail Free Card.

Only Race Card.

 

This your foreign brown girl.

Listening to indigenous dialects whipped

by the sounds of white hurls.

Mutilated into Afrikaans,

apartheid,

ghetto slang,

medieval kidnappers colonize native worlds.

Glueing together the cracks of my hood with

contemporary colonization called

gentrification.

Embezzling and

brightening

dark browns and darker ebonies

that die forgotten.

 

This your native chi-town girl.

Just tryna start a revolución,

238 years post America’s accidental birth.

Just tryna not be

type-casted character

in my own ancestral tragedies.

Just tryna read

trembling history books

defecating unsung elegies.

 

Dear white person who is definitely not racist,

leaders of free worlds

I can’t breathe

as you brood and breed on my body.

 

Dear white person who is definitely not racist, ,

Your wet dreams of brown devil childs

deduced as exotic, undeserving entropy.

 

White people,

I can’t breathe.