How to Be a Brown Body

Abstract

How to Be a Brown Body Ina Cariño (bio) erase the marks of your colonizer: pluck guyabano from your mother's tree mash its Spanish flesh into poultice mix it with the stinging ferns of your bastard country. push your fingers into wet soursop smear it pungent over your sneer until your lips crack & blister from the heat— curse a history of invasion. yes your body began dirt-fallen & stained with the red of your forefathers slaughtered villages creatures caught— but your breastbone will not bend its strength under conquistadors. when the milk-skinned ogle animals will rattle in their cages bark at that same operatic cuff the muzzling of your terrible brown mouth. when you look past the bars will they ask for forgiveness? will they bring you a key? you'd like to forget to forgive but once an animal always an animal. so animal you will be you'll embody [End Page 163] snarling mutts. so still your kneequiver trample unabashed on their grammar let loose your tongue against the pretense of curdled words their rampant policing their fascist snub. purge yourself of such ugly. [End Page 164] Ina Cariño Ina Cariño is a 2022 Whiting Award winner with an MFA in creative writing from North Carolina State University. Their poetry appears in the American Poetry Review, Guernica, Poetry Magazine, the Paris Review Daily, New England Review, and elsewhere. A Kundiman Fellow, Ina was selected as one of four winners of the 2021 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. In 2019, Ina founded a reading series, Indigena Collective, centering marginalized creatives in the community. Copyright © 2022-2023 Pleiades and Pleiades Press