Complicit Poem

Complicit Poem

I am trying to write a poem that is not complicit. But my rage, this page

published, exempts the English department that employs me.

I clutch money, a job with no power while I write to get free. And my friends

who think they are white, read this teary-eyed, and feel unimplicated

in the bizarre shadow of their guilt, —what could have been courage.

When was the last time you chose a glass of pinot over fair pay?

Or convenience that casually poisons our parents with pesticides?

What is a future? I am terrified of what white people choose to look at.

My family worked as farmworkers. Desperate, they hurt each other,

beat their children out of pain then went to bed on a dirt floor.

Would you regard this acknowledgement as redeeming,

or exactly what you thought: —a shame, fascinating—art?

Today, my grandparents cannot read or write, only spell their children’s

names. Criselda, my mother’s name, that most fail to pronounce. Here

I’m scared my vulnerability makes me responsible for what

people do with us. The white editors solicit their absolution from my C.V.

I am an alcoholic, I tell you, and just like my mother in the July issue

for two-hundred dollars. What does your creativity look like?

I cannot shed this resentment that we are not taught

to love ourselves even though it can change the world.

My friend Baleja, said yesterday: When I write

I’m going back to the part of me
that didn’t do better.

Not once have I heard any of my white friends say that.

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