Not A Brown Boy

On the news, at a slam, not from my mother’s father tongue
In a clean cut classroom where I raise my hand and am already wrong
Rather be called gone-rooted, menudo brained, a tri-tip of tree flesh
Is not my skin, is not my skin
O say the words were never summoned
Say the day never dawned on Tenochtitlan
Say the border never handcuffed the calloused hands of the desert
We’ve been messy kin messed by merry kins
O say that was my name
Say I never could be just me
Say we only fuck in color
Say there was a vision of a dog being kicked and killed and barking still
You never call a tree by the sound of its bark
We’ve never convicted a labeling machine
Say we did convict America
Back into rivers and canals
The dogs searching for the scent
Of a drunken judge, the jury screaming with chile in their asses
Or I mean burro, or I mean buried under boroughs,
Or did I mean borrowed? Did you mean burrito?
A birthplace of karma.
How many of us still need to be released
from the wound?

Raul Herrera Jr is a Latinx playwright, educator and spoken word artist. His writing is featured in Coiled Serpent published by Tia Chucha Press, Get Lit Rising which is the winner of the 2016 Silver Nautilus Book Award for young adult non-fiction and, in 2017, wrote Dante, a modern Hip-Hop adaptation of Dante’s Inferno produced by Tim Robbins and The Actor’s Gang Theatre in Culver City. In 2019, Raul was featured as a writer and performer in the film Summertime, directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada, which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.