Sara Borjas
Colonialism
“The true focus of revolutionary change is never really the oppressive situations that we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us.”
-Audre Lorde
I am both a woman
and a woman who asks
what a woman is.
I will never be
guaranteed
against fracture.
I hold my debris.
Look,
my dark hair thick
as whips, my legs
straddled like a couplet
across intimate subjects.
Look
at the Great Story,
still,
straight
as every erased
row of corn, as
the vein’s compulsion
to carry its blood
away.
I ask color
why its named me.
I ask the namer
who her mother is.
She has long hair,
like you.
She eats doubt
from her own hands,
like crumbs.
She wraps her hands
around the eagle’s body
like a dish rag.
Each word even God
writes she takes
credit for.
Who are we
other than the owned
and the owned?
When I say mother
everything that
urged me into this
world scatters
like the body’s
original dust,
the colonizer
always scrambling
to that new, new place.
Fresno Writers dot com 