Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes is a queer, mixed-race, second-generation Colombian immigrant, writer, scholar, artist, and political activist. She has her MA in social justice-based anthropology and her research focuses on issues of state violence in Latin America. She is committed to creative work as a practice of witness, social documentation, historical memory, of radical healing, of provocation to action, and as a tool for liberation. Her poetry has been seen or is forthcoming in a number of literary journals and anthologies, including Kudzu House Review, As/Us, Feminist Studies Journal, Brown and Proud Press, Yellow Medicine Review, Write Bloody’s We Will Be Shelter, and others. She currently lives in Brooklyn.
These 500 years in our bones
striated conquistas dragging
the letters of the harrowed tongue
into the geography
of our marrow, down,
down
these armas in the arms of little, dragging
blood across the pupil dilating moonshadow
breathing in history with light,
portraits of departed hearts, singing
streets, the greed under the floorboards,
libraries of the broken,
amassing names we carve,
unpredictable weather patterns leaving
splinters where our mothers’ houses
once stood, rotten mountains of perfect food
rustled up in the company of flies, & madness,
empty oceans homeless starfish,
the severing of limbs, trees, human fists like
thunder, & vacant motherhoods grasping
at apparitions
& we, we puncture the words we are
teaching you with
every revelation every bit every chain
we have failed to release and burn
we perforate the dawn before it even knows
it has skin, so
take this palm, this love, this firehunger
see what second sight will sigh
in your winding direction, unpeel your
soot-stained eyelids from the corpse parade
and run it through, run it through
find the tomorrow we could not give you.