My Hispanitude

I speak in the fold of the map— 

creased between empire and salt. 

Mother braided three names into my hair, 

none of them white. 

I carry a chair made of silence— 

its legs, the Grito de Dolores, 

its seat, a tongue bitten in school. 

My voice is a garden 

planted in the ruins 

of a burned-down convent, 

mint growing wild in the mouth of a well. 

They said my Spanish was broken. 

But what they heard was 

Arabic echoing through stone, 

a gitano’s guitar wailing in the square, 

Yemayá surfacing between syllables, 

the baobab tree’s roots itching for a stretch, 

the duppy eating akee and saltfish in my voice. 

My Spanish is the color of rust in a sugar boiler. 

It smells like tamarind and the sweat of mango pickers,

ginger for saril and sap from the sugarcane. 

Each word I say contains another— 

one for the father who kissed their child goodbye in Yoruba,

and one for the conquistador who renamed him Juan. 

I showed them my skin, 

called it a palimpsest. 

I opened my mouth 

and invented bolero with 

a hundred eguns in my breath— 

some who danced, some who prayed, 

some who never made it off the boat. 

I write with the red pen they used to grade me wrong,

and eat the drunken fruit that fell from the family tree

they said I didn’t belong to. 

Only as a scar belongs to the blade. 

Do not bow 

to the marble statues of the crown 

or kiss the cracks.

My Hispanitude is not your cathedral.

It is the shadow behind the altar, greater than the thing itself.

The laugh that survives translation. 

I return to the page like a field after fire—

charred, yes, but stubborn.

Full of many seeds in my locs 

that they intended to never survive,

where every rejection 

birthed a refrain. 

Call it exile. Call it inheritance. 

Call it what remains 

when nothing fits

but the mouth that says it anyway

and becomes its own unplace.