For Beloveds Everywhere

My friends and lovers, we don't cry the way mother's mothers used to cry.

These women used to cry whole mud rivers made of
swollen mounds of flesh, more hematoma than breast
full of lactated milk undrank,
babies spared from slavery and genocide.
Mothers' rivers full of broken bones,
effigies of the old gods and goddesses torn up by their clay roots
deforested and shoved into makeshift dustpan corners
old names buried in the wagging tongues of the colonizers.
Tears that do not stay locked in the lachrymal glands, like patient bullets in loaded rifles.
Tears that go down as smooth as battery acid, waiting to be unearthed from the ribs,
great fossils of past hurts.
The spindly bird-bones of memory.
A wise mestiza once said to me,
"Not every song we sing has to be a song of triumph. Some songs will be of sorrow, of failure."
Sealing away our longings and hurt, lungs esophagus and pitiless stomachs made reservoirs of inky waters black and bursting,
Our bodies sweet and swollen blood oranges, leaking and weeping like fresh tattoos.

The hope to cry out loud, more than mothers and mother's mothers quivering eyes could have prayed for us when they looked down on us in heavy arms, only babies swaddled in tissue paper hope.
My friends and lovers, we can cry hallejuahs-worth of big, outspoken, wailing entitled tears.
We don't have to die secret deaths anymore,
carrying suitcases full of ash to our own burial grounds.
Your statistics will speak, no longer a plot point, a simple of unit of data,
voices as fleshy and proud and wounded as the bodies that hold them.
No more silently ticked charcoal tally-marks on the heart's walls.

This poem is for every woman
who doesn't get to stay home, windows drawn,
hoping to unname themselves when the faint grey whispers of men whose names they knew and didn't know creep onto their bodies
leaving a ripe stink like sulfur.

This is for every woman that doesn't want to.
This is for the ones with tender eyes like horses, the ones who are able to smell lightening and try to warn you, shooting clay arrows to get your attention before it is too late.
This is for the ones whose quivers are always full, the ones who are making and making and making arrows. This is not a metaphor. This is a warning.