Poetry :: Kimberly Reyes

Excerpt from “Undertones” by Kimberly Reyes published in The Acentos Review February 2015:

. . .

The machete sugarcane bled

Red on the island

dark and Jíbaro, Salinas poor,

Red was the language we spoke,

fertile in storied humility.

The good Red on the Mainland,

the mixed and other and ancient and othered,

rich ‘got some Indian in me’ reigning Red

whose scorn I

I didn’t know then.

my mutilated being

my maternal brown stain

The:

“why is your last name Reyes?”

“is your husband Spanish?”

This.

. . .

Read the full poem here.