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Literature Text
irma's toenails fall off in the desert, the moon
arroz con leche in the sky and stars
each of her daughter's baby teeth
that she's missing as they exit her mouth
the only kind of snow she's seen is cocaine
dusting the hallways in shacks where
men's noses run and their arms fly, yet
it is strangely quiet
every morning, the sun boils her like a pot
of hard-boiled eggs, and she is served for
breakfast to the american dream: a place
to live and work and white people
arroz con leche in the sky and stars
each of her daughter's baby teeth
that she's missing as they exit her mouth
the only kind of snow she's seen is cocaine
dusting the hallways in shacks where
men's noses run and their arms fly, yet
it is strangely quiet
every morning, the sun boils her like a pot
of hard-boiled eggs, and she is served for
breakfast to the american dream: a place
to live and work and white people
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Written about a family friend. It really does become a completely different issue when you know someone in that position personally.
© 2013 - 2024 ohellohara
Comments5
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wow. this is so heartbreaking throughout, but that last stanza especially kicked me in the gut. the distance between the disparate images gives us the space to imagine the character's portrait being painted; they give us a breadth of experience without weighing the tragedy of it down with density. really well structured.
(I'm currently in southern california where you see so much of this inequality every day. people building their whole wealthy lives on top of it.)
it's such a beautifully crafted poem the whole way through; the one potential critique I'd have is the end of the last stanza. I get that it was trying to nail home the point that she's an outsider and forced into subservience in white america, but I almost feel like leaving it at "served for breakfast to the american dream" conveys all of that, and is a harder-hitting more brutal image anyway.