"Mud Blood" by sara joy márquez
In Brooklyn I could drop my s’s
nod to the grammies in their corner chairs
and all of Los Sures would know after three words:
I was raised white.
Look: more like my brothers,
back home they mouth ‘more ethnic’
with ‘those dark features’ meaning my hair
my eyebrows my top lip but that German
nose nobody knows where to put me.
I make more sense next to my brown daddy in the pew,
but they tell me I’ve got my mother’s knack for books
like it’s expected. First steps out of parochial
the white boys joke mud blood the black boys ask me
am I mixed? Guess.
It’s as good as mine,
but the feet give me
away to that island
what island—oh, it’s owned, I don’t go there.
I don’t know there because daddy said so.
You can’t place me. I could be any
thing in the summer
when my tan has vacationing ladies
in Williamsburg touching my arms, wet gaze on my frizz—
can you believe I’m from where you are, lady?
Try, then try to pretend Sheboygan sounds exotic.
It’s not. I’m brown there even in the winter
and dad’s making a fool of himself with every last
booster clubber in the bar on Fridays:
Borinquen, South Chicago jazzman whose last recapitulation
is full throttle assimilation.
We did the work,
went to church made the shot got the job got the grade
got paid, smiled through it, there’s nothing I want
from my hometown but that unbiased and greedy
lake—
I don’t know how to be brown without palming
my whiteness behind my back. I am both and neither/
nor and nothing
to be certain of, how to tell my baby
brother in his new huge shoes to be responsible for the self
penciled in on the map, it depends,
it depends, I can’t tell you.
sara joy márquez is a Puerto Rican-American writer, worker, survivor, cultivator, educator, advocate, auntie, and occasional musician. Her poems have appeared in Impakter Magazine, The Grief Diaries, The Boston Review, Day One Journal, and The Mississippi Review. She holds degrees in writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Columbia University, and currently lives in Philadelphia.
