It was ten years ago that I found myself at home in the living room wondering desperately about what the future held for me. I was seventeen years old, just graduated from high school, and anxious to get through the summer ahead of me. I felt terribly alone, disassociated from the friends that I’d known, […]
Category: Poetry
Waiting Again, Los Angeles
We wait and we wait and we wait. Patiently. Lovingly. Anguished. We wait for our schools to be safe, For our streets to be cleaned, For our vecindades to have jobs, And for our kids to walk through these spaces without being criminalized. We wait for our neighbors to stop leering at us, For their […]
Poem in Hand, I Would Like to Welcome You With the Following
I experienced discrimination at my schools before I experienced poetry at them. But the first time I was discriminated against based on the color of my skin, the language I spoke at home, or some other characterization of me, I didn’t quite know the definition of the word discrimination. Similarly, the first time I heard […]
