Her word will land in you

By Alana de Hinojosa

Issue 36 • Fall 2017 • Poetry

2nd Place

Poetry 2017 Summer Contest

This is a beautifully constructed poem—a thoughtful elegy for those slaughtered by police brutality, as well as an imagined future for the fatherless victims of racial violence. Both tribute and warning, the poem centers on the daughter of Philando Castile as hope, as avenger. The poem soars, using masterful imagery and powerful self-examination to scorch against the fixed stars of these vile historical and reoccurring wounds.
– Safiya Sinclair

after Philando Castile

When she comes for us, bearing that supple midwest july closing

at dusk, first the fire & then the flies, nightfall’s curly goat fur

after a haircut like her father’s,

seven silver fish strapped with wire to her Falcon breasts,

let us recall

what we did when we heard her child voice, her mother’s

anguished sir, sir, sir, when we saw the video of her father,

& the officer’s brown, familiar hands gloved in ivory.

I know us: we cling to the light we both love & distrust, gulp

sweet honeysuckles while we hunt the night so we may hang it on our walls,

betraying you & you & her

repeatedly, the blaze of it all hovering between us above our crow

& pigeon faces body full of fear, body full of ojalá que

the river whose dark hands midwife our children entering this cruel, possible world

will encounter something different.

But look what we’ve done with his hands:

First the fire

* *

& then the flies:

little things, telescopes & vessels, a father portrait coming in with the tide.

So,

when that girl-child comes for us (as she will),

bearing her firefly,

let us study & map our hands, let us implicate one another

— my brothers, your sisters, davíd & his son who worked for la migra,

doña miriam who called abuela negrita & laughed big teeth, our beloveds

reaching over that thin space between Acá y Allá barbed wire phantoms

even now — let us hold the portrait’s breath, yield

to the child’s delivery, field the questions, her kiss,

mouth of fire, returning the night, & braid

something ordinary as a Falcon’s black feather blooming

in our hair.

Alana de Hinojosa

Alana de Hinojosa is a poet pursing a dissertation in the César E Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies at UCLA that is concerned with histories of displacement, dispossession, diaspora, loss, return, and what these sometimes have to do with rivers and bodies of water. Her poetry has been published in Huizache, Duende, and is forthcoming in Four Chambers, Track//Four, and elsewhere. She is a Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, Las Dos Brujas, and Hampshire College alum. She was raised in Davis, California.