hunting season

I close myself off when I need help the most. I close myself off from the ones who love and believe in me the most. I close myself off because I believe that I deserve nothing but the bare minimum. I close myself off because I do not know how to accept and receive that love, help and support. I close myself off because I've learned how to self-care and self- preserve otherwise. 

My struggles do not exist in a vacuum, but rather, are part of a larger narrative and collection of experiences. 

Being a person of color often feels similar to that voyeuristic element and participation that occurs in museums; the sense of always being on display. Of having to perform. An open field to be looked at, critiqued picked and pulled apart. Hunting season for the white gaze. 

We self- edit and self-regulate ourselves. 

Emotionally gut wrenching and visceral.  

dancing smoke

Thick smoke fills the apartment full of roaches, and I imagine it dancing. 

I spin under it as it envelops me,
and I so desperately want to become it, easily disappearing in the air. 

In the smoke I’ve made a friend, 

One who keeps me company while my mother holds her cigarette in her hands

Every time she smokes, my friend returns, 

and I trail after it...as I desperately trail after her. 

We danced together, the smoke and I. 

Gray clouds that I floated on. 

She concentrated on every inhale, every blow, 

So I started to flush them down the toilet, hoping that would bring me some attention, but it didn't work. 

My friend came back, and I said I was sorry, said my mother loved her more than her daughter’s own folly. 

The smoke took a disliking towards me, 

and the air made me choke, 

and I sucked on my pacifier, 

hoping to revoke, 

all the memories of our friendship, 

as a means to cope. 

Until my mom burned her cigarette on my arm...

Sure it was unintentional, a quick lagging in her arm 

but I grew resentful and stopped chasing after her. 

With me not after her, there was no smoke to comfort me, and I was truly alone. 

And when I became 16, I still danced alone, no father to admire how much I had grown. 

ON BEING MIXED RACE- Based on my experience in America, the DominicanRepublic and Paris.

Being mix race is a very interesting "concept," especially as a Dominican. Before NYU I identified solely as Dominican. I identified as Dominican before I even identified as mix-race and way before I had to acknowledged that being mixed race entailed being both white and black. 

It’s not that Dominicans are denying that they are black, is just that as mix race country, who has experienced quite a lot of oppression (from Spanish colonizers, to when Haiti seized control for a brief period, to the Trujillo dictatorship), we do not think of it as “white and black” the way it is thought about in America, who has a particularly distinct concept of blackness and whiteness (obviously, with Jim Crowe laws, “Sep. but equal," KKK, war on drugs etc etc etc etc). 

Being a white Dominican is not at all the same thing as being white in America, so if you told a white Dominican they are white they will just say, no I’m Dominican. If you told a black Dominican that they are black, they will just say no, I’m Dominican. It’s about ethnicity NOT about “race.” Understand this before you get heated up because America sees "race" and not ethnicity.